Saturday
by SammyMae
Summary: The morning after the reception, the honeymoon is officially over and it's back to work for everybody. Finally back in her mother's good graces, and determined to stay there, Stephanie agrees to hunt down a lost library book and a neighbor's cheating husband. However, sometimes a cheating husband is really just a nice guy, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have things to hide.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: I'm back, and thank you all for your patience! For those of you opening this, who haven't read Thursday and Friday, while this story is a continuation of both, it can stand alone. As usual anything familiar belongs to JE and the mistakes are all mine. The story picks up right where Friday ends.**

The night air was still, and a little sticky, like we might get rain later, but I was seriously doubting it was going to happen. The Fourth of July picnic was also serving as our belated wedding reception, and the combined powers of my mother, Ranger's mother, and Ranger's grandmother Rosa were willing the weather to hold. Even God knew better than to disobey them.

A portable dance floor had been set up on the lawn of the Chesterfield Estate we'd booked for the reception. The capacity of the ballroom of the estate was 200, but it was entirely possible there were four håundred people there that night. The estate had been very accommodating, setting up tents for the bar, and providing luxury port-a-potties for the event, but they weren't letting us inside because of fire-code. If it rained, we were getting soaked.

I was standing next to Ranger eating a hot dog and drinking a beer. The sun had just set, the sky was pink, orange and purple, and I was enjoying myself. My mother came over to me, all smiles, and she scanned my outfit. "Did the other dress not fit?"

"Lunchbox got at it," I said. Lunchbox was Ranger's bird, and he'd obligingly shredded the monstrosity of a dress my mother had picked out for me. I'd have melted in it anyway. It was long sleeved and wool. The dress I was wearing, was a light blue silk sundress with a floaty skirt.

"Why can't you have a normal pet?" My mother asked.

"I do have a normal pet," I said, "I have a hamster. The larcenous, destructive, lock-picking bird belongs to Ranger."

"Well, I suppose this is okay. I still think that green would have looked good on you," she said. "Now, I want you to remember your first wedding."

"Why the fuck would I want to do that?" I asked. The question came out of me before I could censor the f-bomb. Usually, I could control it around my mother. I'd been swearing since I was a little kid, but everyone knew you pretended that you didn't know how to cuss, in front of your mother. From the look on mom's face, I was pretty sure I was grounded now.

"I'm sorry Carlos," mom said, "I did raise her better than that."

"I've heard worse," Ranger said.

"No doubt you have," she said and glared at me like it was my fault men in the military cussed. "Anyway, the reason I am bringing this up is your first dance is coming up now that the sun is down, and we want the pictures while the sky is still so pretty."

"Nope," I said. I was not doing that. I loved Ranger, and I would totally dance with him tonight, but not alone while everyone stood in a circle watching us. I wasn't doing that now. No way, nuh uh, not going to happen. The reason she wanted me to remember my first wedding was that I got so nervous trying to dance with my first husband (while wearing a wedding gown with a badly bustled train) that I was blushing this ugly blotchy blush that prompted Dickie to ask if I was having an allergic reaction. I stepped backward, tripped on the train, and my asshole husband didn't bother to help me out at all, and I went down flashing my sexy white lingerie at everyone.

We all pretended it hadn't happened, but it did, and I always sort of thought of that as an omen for the marriage. I knew Ranger wouldn't let me bail, but I also knew that the cell phone moratorium we had on for the evening was going to end the second we stepped on the dance floor as everyone who was at my first wedding prepared for a re-run of the incident.

"You have to," my mother said. "I paid a lot for that photographer, and you're going out there."

I looked pleadingly up at Ranger; he offered me his hand, and as we walked towards the dance floor, I gave him the context of the conversation with my mother.

"I know how you can avoid flashing the crowd your underwear," Ranger said. "Come with me."

We detoured away from the party to the port-a-potties, and we went behind them. Ranger looked around to make sure nobody was watching and knelt in front of me. "Put your hands on my shoulders."

I did as he said, and he gave me a wicked grin before he reached up my skirt and yanked my panties down. "Ranger!" I hissed. He grasped one of my ankles, lifted my foot, and unhooked my underwear from my shoe, and then did the same with the other. He stood up and stuffed my unmentionables in his pants pocket.

"Now you can't flash people your underwear. Only I'll get to know what it looks like."

"I can't dance without my underwear; not in front of my mom!"

"How is she going to know?"

"When I moon everyone," I said.

"And if I told you this is all part of a plan?" He said with a raised eyebrow.

"Well am I going to like this plan?" I asked.

"I've disabled the alarms on an exhibit in that mansion back there."

"What sort of exhibit?" I asked.

"A three-hundred-year-old bed that can sleep twelve. It used to belong in an Inn, and it is supposed to have seen a few thousand wedding nights, and who knows how many other escapades. Apparently, it's haunted by some excitable spirits, and it's supposed to heighten the experience."

"You want to have sex in a haunted museum exhibit?" I said.

His dark eyes flashed, and holy cow, yes he did. Ranger was into the idea of a ghost orgy. Who knew? "It'll have to be quick," he said.

I looked back at the house. "After our dance?"

He nodded. I took his hand, and half dragged him back to the dance floor. Mom saw us come back and she spoke to the DJ, and then shoved me onto the dance floor. Tony Bennet started playing, and Ranger slipped his hand around my waist.

We were about a minute into the song when Ranger slid his hand down my back and over my ass, and I was about to admonish him for groping me in front of family, when the wind took my skirt, and he pressed me against him, so that it didn't flare up, and I didn't flash the crowd.

I swear to God he'd done this a second before the breeze hit us, and I stared up at him wondering how the fuck he knew that was going to happen. Ranger's good, but he's not that good.

"How?" I asked.

He grinned, leaned in and whispered, "I'm Batman."

I burst out laughing and forgot about the horror of my first wedding and the awful dancing, and just enjoyed moving with Ranger on the dance floor. We mingled after the song ended, and everyone else had joined us on the dance floor. As soon as there was an opening, and we were confident we wouldn't be missed, Ranger and I made for the house by way of one of the booze tents.

He unlocked the door as if the lock wasn't even there, and punched in a code on the Rangeman security panel on the wall. A light blinked, the alarm disengaged, the door closed and the system re-engaged as if it had never turned off. I was willing to bet only Ranger knew that code.

He took my hand and led me through the house and up the stairs, under a velvet rope, and into a master bedroom. I don't really know what I was expecting when he told me it was a bed that slept twelve, but I wasn't expecting something that big. It was a four poster bed, that looked like someone had pushed three, short, king-sized mattresses together. It was huge, and the bedding seemed really soft.

"It's made of feathers," Ranger said.

I had this irrational thought that a bunch of horny lovers didn't haunt the bed, but instead, it was haunted by flocks of naked chickens. That thought quickly changed when Ranger slid his hand up my thigh, and he started kissing me. The air in the room was charged, with either energy from the impending weather, or from the ghosts in the bed; I didn't care which. He backed me up against the mattress, and I fell back onto the soft, bed. It creaked a little, but I was reasonably sure it could take our weight if it were meant to sleep a dozen people.

With that thought, I backed further onto the bed. If we were going to use the bed, it was probably a good idea to use as much as possible. You know, just to make sure we hit all of the extra haunted spots. Ranger's mouth was on the inside of my thigh, working his way to the promised land when I heard the creak outside of footsteps. Ranger had me off the bed, and into the closet before I registered what we were doing there.

The change of venue barely stalled Ranger, as he pushed me up against the closet wall, he hiked my leg up over his hip, and he ground against me. I reached for his belt, and he suddenly grabbed my hand with his left hand and covered my mouth with his right. He only covered it for a second, and then he put his finger to his lips, motioning for me to be quiet. He knelt again and drew a gun from his ankle holster.

I heard footsteps in the other room and wished Batman had his utility belt on him. Rangeman ran security here so Ranger wouldn't draw on one of his men, and if it were another couple with the same idea we had, Ranger would be inside me right now. No there was a threat out there, and I wanted a weapon. "Text Tank," Ranger whispered in my ear and handed me his phone. I did as directed, and we listened to what was going on in the room.

"You're sure they're in here?" A voice said.

"Anton told me he hid them under the mattress," another voice said.

"And you're sure we should be doing this when there are four hundred people out there?"

"Yeah," he said. "It's the boss of the security company's wedding, and the new wife is a disaster magnet; everyone will be watching the yard, not the house."

That was actually pretty sound reasoning. If there was going to be trouble, it was going to be wherever I was. In fact, the men in the room out there didn't realize that they were illustrating their point beautifully. I thought it was sort of poetic. We listened hard and didn't hear anything except for a scraping sound, and I swear to God I thought I heard Jingle Bell Rock playing somewhere.

"No use man," the first voice said, "I can't get all the way over. There's a big support beam down the middle of the bed, and I can't get under it. He must have come at it from the other side."

"How? The bed is against the wall."

"He said the bed was in the middle of the room. They musta moved it."

"We'll have to just cut through the mattress."

I wouldn't do that if I were you, I thought. Thousands of poultry-guiests were going to come after them if they did that.

"No asshole, not through the quilt. My Grandma would string us up by our balls if we did that. It's hand stitched, do you have any idea how many hours hat would have taken?"

"Sorry."

Ranger very slowly unlatched the door and pushed it opened. One man was walking on the pillows of the bed, and the other was on the floor at the foot of the bed, and they were carefully folding the quilt halfway across the mattress. The guy on the bed, was Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, except with the right amount of fingers for a nonanimated person, and he was orange from spray tan, instead of yellow from living in Springfield. He was dressed all in black, and had taken his shoes off before getting on the bed. His white socks stood out against the black of his jeans.

The second guy had dust marks on his back and a dust bunny riding a parrot on his right shoulder. He was wearing faded jeans, a man bun, and had a Jack Sparrow goatee.

Cletus knelt down on the pillows and jabbed his knife into one of them. Now seriously that was just wasteful. If they were looking for whatever underneath a mattress, why not move the pillows too?

"Stop," Ranger said.

Both men froze and looked at Ranger. Jack Dust Bunny, pulled a gun and pointed it at me; it was bright green and made of plastic. I tilted my head and looked at it.

"Really?" I said. "He's got a 9mm, and that's a water gun. Do you really think you have a chance?"

"You don't know what's in it," Cletus said.

"Water?" I guessed.

"Maybe it's acid," Cletus said.

"Is it?" Ranger asked.

"No," Cletus said, "But it could be."

Cletus then picked up his knife, and held it threateningly at Ranger, forgetting that there was a pillow impaled on it. He went to shake the pillow off and started spraying feathers everywhere. He lost grip of the knife and it flew up and jammed in the framing of the four-poster. In the chaos, the guy with the water gun started firing it, and it jammed with feathers, so he threw it at Ranger. Ranger didn't so much as blink as it flew past him and hit the wall.

"Are you finished?" Ranger asked. His shirt wasn't even wet. It was a cheap water pistol and it had about a two-foot range.

Cletus threw a pillow at Jack, and Jack ripped the pillow open, but I guess only the one Cletus was playing with was an authentic feather and the rest were cheap pillow forms because all he succeeded in doing was revealing a bunch of fiber-fill. He tried to fluff it out into a cloud to throw at us, and when that didn't work he tried to form it into snowballs.

During all of this Tank came into the room, and made eye contact with Ranger, looking for orders. Ranger shrugged.

"Run George!" Jack said.

"What?" Cletus asked.

"While they are distracted!"

I watched Cletus jump off of the bed and run full on into Tank. He bounced off of the big guy and fell into Jack, who tagged me with a snowball (which was surprisingly robust) and labeled me in the hollow of my shoulder. Jack hit the ground with a thud and whacked his head off the floor, going lights out. Cletus freaked out at us because we'd killed his friend, and decided that the least threatening of the three of us was Tank and decided he was going to tackle him.

He went low, and head-butted Tank in the groin and Tank went down but had the presence of mind to grab Cletus around the ankle. Cletus went sprawling onto the ground and scrambled to try to get away from the giant paw that had a death grip around his ankle.

Ranger calmly walked over to Tank and took some Flexi-cuffs from his belt, and fastened them around Cletus's wrists and ankles, and then did the same thing to Jack.

While he was doing this, I reached down and picked up the fluff ball that labeled me and looked inside it. There I found a black velvet bag, vacuum packed by one of those food savers machines. I went to the pillow that had been used as a weapon and looked inside revealing three more bags like this.

"Uhh, Ranger?" I said.

He turned to look at me, and he took one of the bags. He used a pocket knife to open the food saver bag, and pulled out the velvet pouch. He dumped a bunch of stones out onto his hand. "That would be a bag of sapphires," Ranger said. "And the Anton they are talking about it probably Anton Mergeller."

"Who the hell is that?" I asked.

"He's a small-time thief who is a prime suspect in two jewelry store robberies, where he grabbed pouches of loose stones and stashed them somewhere. His lawyer has a compelling stack of circumstantial evidence that points to collusion between the store owners who he claims are selling the stones on the black market to cover some debts. Closing arguments are scheduled for Monday, and if the prosecution has no rebuttal witnesses, Mergeller is probably going to get off."

"Oops," I said.

Ranger nodded. "All they had to do was wait a few more days. Once acquitted, they can't charge him again for the same crime."

Ranger nodded again. Tank looked a little grey, but he was somewhat recovered. Ranger hauled him to his feet. "You Good?"

"Yep," Tank said.

Ranger turned to me, "Call Morelli."

"Not a good idea, boss. I saw him as I was coming up here. He had his tongue down some girl's throat, and I'm pretty sure they are both completely shit-faced."

"Good for him," I said. "But the problem is that everyone else I know on the Force is downstairs, and it's an open bar. None of them are going to be sober."

If I went downstairs and did manage to find a sober cop to come upstairs, they wouldn't ask potentially sticky questions like, what Ranger and I in the closet in the first place, and that would give us a chance to come up with a plausible reason that wasn't that we wanted to see about a ghost orgy. Also, if they did ask why we were upstairs, and Ranger gave them his blank face that said, 'Move on if you want to keep all of your fingers,' they generally moved on.

Since they were probably all drunk I'd have to give my statement to someone I didn't know, and they would for sure ask us why we were upstairs, and they might not understand the blank face.

Ranger had the same thought, so he called the D.A. It was just easier that way.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: I forgot to mention that the last chapter was dedicated to my husband who demanded that I start the story off with a little hijinx. Thank you to everyone for reading, and for following and reviewing! Usual disclaimers apply.**

I woke up far too early on July 5th to Ranger getting out of bed.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I have to go handle something so that someone doesn't completely lose his fucking mind today."

"Sounds fun," I said.

"There's a pretty good chance I'm going to get puked on," Ranger said.

"I'm definitely not coming. If I do, they'll miss you and hit me," I said.

"I figured you'd say that," Ranger said. "I'll be back."

Ranger left, and I went back to sleep, only for the phone to ring thirty minutes later at 7:00 and I was seriously considering just throwing the phone across the room. I can't tell you how satisfying that would have been.

"Yo," I answered the phone.

"It's your mother," my mom said, sounding resigned. I think she was pretty much giving up on me. My telephone manners were regressing, and I think she's just happy I didn't answer the phone with "What?"

"Hi mom," I said. "What's up?"

"I'm at the library, and I'm having issues with my library card."

"What kind of issues?" I asked, also wondering what the hell the library card had to do with me. I didn't say that out loud. Mom was finally speaking to me again without sounding like she wanted to deny me desserts for the rest of my life.

"Apparently you didn't return a book you borrowed from me," she said. A book I'd borrowed? My first thought was that my mom was still drunk from the night before and had called me instead of Val this morning. I'm not exactly an avid reader, and mom and I don't exactly have the same taste in literature.

Mom was really big into romance novels, and frankly, they just pissed me off. All of these women thought they had complicated love lives and didn't have the first idea what complicated, meant. Val, on the other hand, loved them and she and mom often shared books.

Not to mention I was not good at recreational reading. What usually happened was that I would pick up a book at the end of the day and then I would pass out after reading half a page. It wasn't that I didn't find books interesting, it was just that I was usually wiped at the end of the day, and I was better at staring blankly at the television letting it think for me. And you can multitask while you watch TV. You can't do that while you read. Either you are reading, or you're doing other stuff. There was no in between.

"You have the wrong daughter," I said.

"No," she said, "I know who I called, Stephanie. You had the book. You borrowed it that time Joseph's cable was out, and you were going to sit at home all day waiting for the cable repairman."

I know precisely the time she was talking about. One of my upstairs neighbors had decided to have fireworks for her birthday party, forgetting that we lived in an apartment complex. She let off the fireworks and managed to blow up the fire escape, and she set fire to my apartment. I mean par for the course for me, really, so I'd moved in with Morelli. He was working a lot of double shifts, and his family was supposed to be coming over to watch Football at his house, but his cable was down. So he called the cable guy and made it worth my while to sit around for three days waiting for him to show up.

"Mom," I said, "That was two years ago."

"There are some overdue charges and the new lady at the library is not a very nice person," mom said. I heard grandma in the background say that she was an epic monster bitch.

"Mom," I said, "I can't go over to Joe's right now to get the book. He's got a…a friend over. It would be awkward."

"You left it at Joseph's house?" Mom asked.

"If I didn't take it back to the library, then yeah," I said, "But I'm sure I took it back."

"Well the computer says that you didn't," mom said. "She said we have to pay the fines and return the book, or pay the fines and replace the book."

"Well, what's the name of the book?" I asked. "I'll go pick it up at the bookstore, and return it."

"She won't tell me."

"She won't tell you?" I asked.

"She said she can't open the file because my account is frozen and she needs her boss's permission to do it, and he's out of town right now. All she can tell me is that the book is called, 'The W…'"

"The W…" I said.

"It's truncated on the menu screen, and she won't open it without her boss's permission."

"Won't or can't?"

"Won't," mom said. "She said that she's not sure if she's allowed to let me see the information because she's new and hasn't come across someone who they are going to send to collections. So she's not sure what she can tell me."

"How much are your fines?"

"$700," mom said.

"Holy f—cow."

"What's an f cow?"

"An autocorrect," I said.

"Your mouth autocorrected?" My mom said incredulously.

"Darn skippy," I said. I'd already dropped one f-bomb on her in the last twenty-four hours. I wasn't going to risk dropping another.

"Do you know anything else about the book?" I asked.

"She printed a color copy of the charge, and I can tell you that it's a blue cover with pink writing."

"What's it about?"

"I don't remember Stephanie, it was two years ago," mom said impatiently, "Could you just retrieve the book for me? Please?"

There are a lot of things I would rather do than interrupt Joe the morning after when he's probably hung over and has a friend over. For instance, the first thing that springs to mind is wiring my nipples to a car battery; I'd happily do that over going to his place right now.

"I'll go over this afternoon," I said. "Will that be soon enough?"

"No," mom said. "I needed to use the computers, and that's the whole reason I was at the library in the first place."

"Use grandma's," I said.

"I will not. It's too complicated, and all of these voices come out of it, and they all cuss a lot."

"Go home," I said, "I'll figure something out."

I hung up the phone and rolled out of bed. I went to the bathroom and didn't bother looking in the mirror before I got into the shower because I knew it wouldn't be good. I stood under the spray for a long time before I did anything to clean myself, and then I got out and tried to figure out what I was going to do with my appearance. I combed out the tangles in my hair, added some anti-frizz gunk, slathered on some mascara, and called it a job well done.

I put on a pair of cut off jeans that were a reasonable length, but not something my mom would wear, and pulled on a red stretchy tank top. I crammed my feet into some flipflops and put a hair elastic around my wrist just in case I needed it later. I went out to the kitchen where Lunch Box was standing on the counter glaring at the fruit bowl on top of the fridge, frustrated that he couldn't fly up there to massacre a banana.

I pulled down two bananas and gave half of one to Lunch Box, half to Rex, scratched Lunch Box's head and ate the second banana for myself. The banana wasn't my real breakfast, it was the snack that would tide me over until real breakfast. There were Fruity Pebbles in the cupboard, but I wasn't in the mood for them. We were running low on groceries, and by that I meant, crap I like to have in the house but feel bad asking Ella to pick up.

I grabbed a notepad that Ella kept in a drawer by the fridge, and I made myself a grocery list, and then called Ella and explained why I was going to the market, and she told me what else I needed to pick up. I put the list in my pocket, grabbed my shoulder bag from the counter, and shuffled out to the elevator that would take me to the garage.

I rooted around in my purse and came up with a set of keys to my dead Range Rover, and the keys to Ranger's new Porsche 918. Damn. I needed a new car. I knew I could go upstairs and find the keys to the Cayenne, or I could take one of the fleet vehicles. All I'd have to do is go upstairs and get a set of keys from Ranger's office. I had a fob that would get me in and everything, but I didn't want to do that. I didn't like taking the fleet vehicles when I wasn't working. I absolutely didn't want to drive Ranger's new baby, and he had the 911.

Ranger pulled into the garage while I was thinking about what I should do, and once he was parked, tossed me the keys to the Turbo.

"Long morning?" he asked.

"I need a car," I said.

"We have three," he said.

"No," I said, "You have three. If I drive one of these and call it mine, it's going to get destroyed in some flukey horrible way. They survive longer if I just borrow them from you."

"Your luck might be changing," Ranger said. "Where are you going?"

"The grocery store, an electronics store, a bookstore, and then my mother's. Wanna come?"

"Can it wait until after lunch?" He asked.

"Probably not," I said. "Meet me at the diner for food later?"

"Sounds good," Ranger said. He kissed me, and I got into the car. He was already on his phone befoe he stepped into the elevator. We had our honeymoon, and last night was fun, but it was back to work today. I sighed and pulled out of the garage.

My first stop was breakfast and bought myself a fried egg sandwich and a giant coffee. The bag that held my sandwich was small, and I felt a bit sad. Part of me missed the old days where I'd get doughnuts and then go hang out at the bonds office for a bit while I ate. Now the Bonds Office was home to my nemesis and my rodent of a cousin Vinnie. After I bailed him out a little while ago, he paid me back by taking on my least favorite person in the world, as partner. I quit on the spot, followed closely by Lula, and Connie. Lula was out of the gig entirely, and now working as a production consultant for our friend Sally Sweet, who also happened to be the father of her unborn baby.

Connie was working as office manager for Ranger, and while the pay was good, she got a lot more respect, and she didn't have to worry about her boss trying to grab her ass all of the time, she was dying of boredom. Her life would get a lot more interesting when Ranger got her some security clearance so she could handle some of the more exciting office issues, until then, she was stuck filing, sorting out pay and answering phones.

I drove to the Shop and Bag and got out of the sweet blissful air-conditioning utterly unprepared for the wall of humidity and heat outside of the car. It was four hundred times worse than the day before, and the sun felt about nine times brighter than it normally would have, thanks to the smoggy haze that hung in the air so thick that you almost needed a chainsaw to get through it.

I walked through the parking lot thankful that nothing that I was going to buy needed refrigeration and went into the store. I picked up a giant jar of cheese puffs that might cause alarms to go off at Haywood when I brought it in. To feel a little more virtuous, I added a bag of apples, a gigantic tub of peanut butter, a box of Corn Flakes, that I was going to use to cut my Frosted Flakes so I could tell Ranger that I was eating better, and a box of Rice Crispies. I grabbed a few other snacks while I was at it, and a big box of Freezies to shove in the freezer when I got home.

I lugged it all out to the car, and I put it into the trunk. By then Crystal's Computers was open, so I went inside, and looked around. I liked Crystal's computers. I went to high school with Crystal and she only up-sold people she didn't like or treated her like she was an idiot because she was a girl working in a computer store.

She was about 4'8" and compensated by wearing enormous, Big Bird yellow, platforms with absolutely everything. Today it was a pair of painted on acid wash jeans, and a Guns n Roses tank top. Her hair was a bit 80's pop star but so was mine now probably thanks to the humidity. Thinking about it, I wrestled my hair into a ponytail just because I figured it was about time that I did, before it got too unruly.

"What's up, Steph?" Crystal asked.

"Mom needs a computer," I said. "Grandma's scares her, and there is a new dragon guarding the library."

"She's great for business," Crystal said. "You're my ninth customer to come here because of that woman. I'm thinking of sending her a commission cheque. What's your mother's skill level like?"

"She says please and thank you to Google."

"Okay then," Crystal said. "What is she going to use it for?"

"Not a lot," I said. "Making photo books mostly from a website, and occasionally looking up recipes online, and paying bills."

"Okay," Crystal said. She hooked me up with a Microsoft Surface and then told me she was going to set it up with what she called the Burg special, which basically made everything super simple, so that even mom couldn't get confused by it, and told me to come back in an hour. My next stop was a used bookstore in the same plaza.

I got grandma to send me a picture of the cover of the book from the printout the woman at the library had given mom, and I showed it to the woman behind the counter. "Uhh, that's really hard to see," she said.

The picture was less than an inch tall. You could just make out the pink and blue of the cover. "The W?"

I explained the situation to her, and she shrugged, "Personally I'd just call the library when she's not working. Someone would get it for you."

"My mom wants me to recover the book today," I said. So we spent an hour going through all paperbacks that started with 'W' and came up with three possibilities. None of them rang a bell since I couldn't tell you what the book was about in the first place.

I bought all three for $10 and went back to Crystal to get mom's computer. If one of these books worked, then I was saved from having to go to Joe's place later today. With mom's new computer dealt with, I brought it into the car, and put it on the passenger seat, and turned the engine over. There was an indicator light on saying that the trunk was open. I got back out of the car and went to the back to see that a handle from one of the plastic grocery bags was around the latch thingie, so I untangled it and looked in the back to make sure there were no booby traps or anything like that.

All clear, I closed the trunk and drove over to my mother's, incident free.

When I got there, mom was standing on the porch talking to a woman who was wearing a chartreuse suit that I'm pretty sure the Queen of England would enjoy. She was wearing white gloves on her hands and had her little patent black handbag's handle hooked on her left arm. She was wearing thick tights, and shoes that matched her suit perfectly.

She was about ten years older than I was, and she had her hair cut like Jackie Kennedy, with enough hairspray in it to act as a helmet. I had absolutely no idea who she was, but when mom saw me, she waved at me impatiently to come over.

I'd parked on the street, so I jogged up the lawn, and up the steps. "This is my daughter Stephanie," mom said, "Stephanie, this is Bernadette Dickerson. She needs your help."

Bernadette looked at me, unsure if I really was my mother's daughter. I took more after my dad, and mom was much more conservatively dressed than I was, with perfectly pressed tan capris, and a petal pink sleeveless blouse.

"Stephanie is good at this sort of thing," mom was saying, "She does private investigations all the time. I know she doesn't look professional right now, but she's probably dressed to blend in for some assignment."

That was a big fat fib, and we all knew it. Mom was a terrible liar. I always dressed like this. "Why don't we go inside where it'll be cooler?" I said. Though to be totally honest it didn't exactly look like she was suffering despite the many layers she was sporting. We all went to sit down at the kitchen table, and mom produced some coffee and some coffee cake. Mom always had coffee or marble cake in case company came over, and if it weren't for the fat that she had me pick it up for her on more than one occasion, I might almost think that she had a private wormhole to the bakery, hiding in her pantry.

"Just tell Stephanie everything you told me," my mom said.

Bernadette Dickerson was the wife of my favorite middle school teacher, Waldo Dickerson. I always loved Mr. Dickerson because he was one of those teachers who genuinely seemed to care. Now I'd recently been burned by believing that a high school teacher beloved by the community could be faultless, so I was willing to listen, but I didn't really want to.

When I was ten, I convinced myself that I was invisible and tried to walk into the boys' bathroom, and I got caught. Mr. Dickerson heard about it from my sister who was absolutely mortified to be related to me, and he sent her home with a present for me. It was a book called, 'The Science of Super-Heroes,' And he'd written, _Don't give up on your dreams_. On the inside. So my tolerance for talking bad about him was pretty freaking low.

"About five years ago," Bernadette said, "I met Waldo on a cruise. He'd come into a little money and decided to go around the world. We met in Venice."

"Where are you from originally?" I asked.

"She's lived down the street for more or less your whole life Stephanie," mom said with a roll of her eyes,

"Oh she would have no reason to know me," Bernadette said. "Anyway, we hit it off on the cruise, and The Burg connection was something we laughed about a lot. We got married about three years ago, and we've been very happy. Only about six months ago, he started picking up some off-the-books tutoring work to bring in some extra money."

"Tutoring who?" I asked. She shrugged.

"Anyone who answered his ad I guess. He had a website set up and everything. Then about four months ago he started going out to help a student who could only meet after 8:00. I'm not an idiot, and of course I thought he was having an affair. Last night, I followed him after he left, and we went out towards Franklin, to this little village, called Steveston. He went to this house, and he was met at the door by a girl wearing nothing but a t-shirt and holding a glass of wine. And I mean girl. She couldn't have been more than sixteen. He went inside, and he was there for at least half an hour. I couldn't stay any longer because I couldn't take it anymore."

"Now you don't know that she was wearing only a t-shirt," mom said, "Some of these girls today are wearing shorts that are very short, and dresses that look like shirts. It's possible she's just a student."

"I know that, and I wouldn't even really be suspecting except, well, we haven't been intimate for months."

"Oh," mom said, "Oh dear. You do know that at fifty, things can sometimes… well, they might not exactly work. There are little pills that do wonders for that."

"And I asked if that was the problem, but he says it's not. He said that he's just been tired and that when he's got the energy, I'm always at work. He says we're just out of synch and if we didn't need the extra money, he wouldn't be tired all of the time."

"Why do you need the extra money?" I asked.

"Well that's just it," she said, "I don't know exactly. He started talking about it, and well I know I shouldn't have done it, but I'm an investment counselor at Trenton Mutual, and I have access to all sorts of information, and I ran a credit check on my husband, and he has no outstanding debt. And we're doing all right financially. I mean yes sometimes things are tight, and we really should consider getting a new car, but we're not in any sort of position to be worried about money."

"He's a middle school teacher," I said, "Aren't teachers chronically low on cash?"

"Yes," she said, "And he sets aside a large portion of his pay to buy books and supplies for his classroom, but I make enough to support us both."

"Maybe he wants to feel like he's contributing more?" Mom suggested.

"Look if it were just that he's stepping out on me, I wouldn't be bringing this to you," she said, "It's that I think he's committing a crime, and I can't have that on my conscience."

Mom nodded her understanding and patted Mrs. Dickerson's hand. Mrs. Dickerson looked at her watch. "I have to get back home before he does, or he'll suspect something." She handed me her business card. "Call my office if you find something."

"Okay," I said. There was no way I could turn this down or mom would kill me. Part of me wondered if I should call Joe to tell him about it, just in case there was a crime being committed, but I didn't want word to get out that Dickerson might be sleeping with a student. If he were innocent, his career would be ruined for nothing. Mom saw Mrs. Dickerson to the door and came back to her kitchen.

"That woman is insane if she thinks her husband is stepping out on her," mom said. "Waldo Dickerson is a very good man, and I flat out refuse to believe he'd be involved with a student. He's been teaching for twenty years, and there's never been so much as a whiff of a scandal about him."

"What about this money he came into?"

"His great aunt died, and apparently had a large life insurance policy that he was the sole beneficiary of."

"Why?"

"Because he mowed her lawns on weekends, and she was a crazy old bat who thought the $5 she insisted on giving him a week, was what kept his head above water financially. She took the insurance policy out so he wouldn't have to worry about the lack of additional income when she died."

"Really?" I said.

"Ask your grandmother," mom said. "She told me about it. Eileen got an excellent deal on the policy and mom was thinking about taking out a policy for herself and naming you the beneficiary because you were always broke. She thought she'd leave you the Buick and the policy."

"Val could use it more than I could," I said, "She has a thousand children, and her husband isn't exactly rolling in it."

"Which is more or less what I said to mom. Even at your poorest, you didn't have, and you had Joseph and Ranger if you needed them, and you could always move home if things got really desperate. What is Valerie going to do with her children? I love the girls, but they can't stay here. It would be a madhouse."

"Did grandma get that policy?"

"I don't know," mom said. "You'd have to ask her."

"Where is, grandma? I thought you were together at the library?"

"She's looking at a retirement community with that… Person."

'That person' being Balthazar Williams, grandma's long lost lover/ grandpa's rival in grandma's own personal love triangle back when she was my age. He'd come back into her life a few months ago, and she said that he was more or less a horse's ass, but he'd been like that when she knew him before, so really nothing had changed.

"Dad must be thrilled," I said.

"He's been whistling all morning."

"Is grandma seriously thinking about moving out?"

"No idea," mom said, "She's been saying this to humor him, but I don't know if it's actually going to happen. She can't really afford a place like this, but he says they can share a duplex, and he's got the money. I don't like it."

I didn't really have a comment. I didn't know how I felt about it. I mean it was fantastic that grandma seemed happy, but I didn't know if it was a good idea for her to be moving in with the guy. "So I got you a present today," I said, changing the subject.

"Oh?" Mom asked.

"Yeah," I said, "It's in the car. I'll be right back."

I jogged outside and noticed that the trunk was opened again. "Seriously?" I said. I closed it again, and it popped back open. That wasn't good. I shut it, and it opened immediately. I looked at the key fob and realized that the button for the trunk was a little crusty. That was weird. These were Ranger's keys. Everything Ranger owned always looked pristine. I scraped the crud off of the key fob with my fingernail, the button released, and when I closed the trunk, it actually stayed closed.

I went to the front seat to get the bag of books and the Surface and went back inside. I handed mom the books. "Are any of these your book?"

"No," mom said, "I don't think so."

She read the backs of them and shook her head. "No, I don't recognize them. They look interesting though."

"Keep them," I said.

"Is this my present?" Mom asked.

"No," I said. "This is. So you don't have to get past that battle-ax at the library."

I brought out the Surface and gave her a quick lesson on how to use it. When I left her, she was happily putting all of her recipes into a recipe box program she'd downloaded. I went out to the car and called Ranger.

"Still on for lunch?" I asked.

"I'll have Tank drop me off at the diner in ten," Ranger said. I put the car in gear and headed to the Diner beating Ranger by about two minutes and sat on the hood of the car waiting for him.

"Busy morning?" I asked when he got there. He kissed me stupid, and copped a feel of my ass, in the process.

"Very," he said. We walked into the diner and sat in our usual booth. "I might be going to Washington next month."

"For how long?" I asked.

"No idea," he said. "I'm thinking about getting an apartment there. It looks like I'm going to be going back an forth a lot. I was thinking you should come with me when I go. That way you can handle the Rangeman shit I usually have to deal with while I'm away."

"What do you usually do?" I asked.

"Tank fills me in when I have a free minute, and then I try to cram in the research, paperwork, and evaluations whenever I'm not in fucking meetings. It would make my life easier if you were there. I could tell you what I needed, and you could just do it, so all I have to do is read it later."

"You find it really really handy that I'm willing to do your paperwork, don't you," I said.

"You have no idea," he said. "And this way you have a reason to come to DC with me."

"Besides liking you a little and wanting to see you?"

"We both know that you'd go crazy if you didn't feel useful. You'd be happier at home, doing whatever you thought might be useful at Rangeman."

"Speaking of," I said, "I have a case, and I don't think she can afford our rates, but if I don't take it I'm pretty sure mom is going to disown me."

"What kind of case?"

"Cheating husband," I said.

"Your father's not cheating on your mother," Ranger said.

"No, not him. My middle school science teacher, Mr. Dickerson."

"Bernadette needs to up her meds," Ranger said.

"You know Bernadette Dickerson?" I said.

Ranger nodded. "I met her in New York before she got married. She used to be a wealth management consultant, and she handled some of my investments."

"Past tense?" I asked.

"She got sick," he said. "It's why she's always dressed like it's the middle of winter. The mercury could be in the triple digits, and she'd be cold. That's one of her milder symptoms. One of the things that bring on episodes is stress, so they recommended that she quit. She moved back to Trenton to live with her parents, and took up the same job at Trenton Mutual, but with fewer clients, and smaller portfolios."

"What makes you think Mr. Dickerson isn't cheating on her?"

"He loves her," Ranger said.

"You really are quite the romantic," I said.

"Yes," he said, "But that has nothing to do with my assessment of things. If you wanted to put pressure on Waldo Dickerson, all you'd have to do is hint at the possibility of hurting his wife, and he'd bend over backward and do literally anything to protect her."

"You know this how?"

"She was in a car accident a year or so ago, and she was in the hospital for about a week. He wanted to sue the man who caused the accident and for whatever reason, his insurance company wouldn't go for it. He asked me if there was anything I could do."

"Seriously? Like he wanted you to whack the guy?"

"More like intimidate him into paying for Bernadette's hospital bills."

"Did you?"

"No," Ranger said, "But I did make a phone call to their insurance provider so they would stop dragging their heels about paying her bills."

"Why wouldn't they pay the bills?"

"They claimed that her injuries were taking so long to heal due to her pre-existing condition, and because of that a procedure she needed wasn't going to be covered by their policy."

"What did you do?"

"Threatened to take my business elsewhere."

"Why would that work?"

"It would cost them more money to lose me than it would to just cough up the money for the procedure."

Considering that I was on his policy, I could buy that. "Do you think I should just leave it?"

"No," he said, "Give her some peace of mind, and if I'm wrong and he's having an affair with a student, take it to Morelli."

"Speaking of Morelli," I said. "Do you think Hector would be willing to hack the Library's computer?"

"Why?"

I filled him in on mom's book problem and the dragon at the library.

"What does that have to do with Morelli?" He asked.

"I think the book might be at his house," I said. "Chances are that if he was hammered last night, he's not up yet. If he is, he'll be pissy because he's hungover. I don't want to walk into that."

"Can it wait a day?"

"Yeah," I said, "But only because I'm 90% sure that book is history. I mean I've cleaned Morelli's place, and if I'd seen the book sometime in the last two years, I'd have taken it to the library, or at the very least shoved it in my handbag. And if I did that, it's really long gone. If I knew the title of the book, I could just replace the damn thing and get it over with."

"I think the woman at the library is on a bit of a power trip. Odds are that book has been written off already."

"That's what I was thinking, but mom is freaked out."

"I think hacking the library is a bit extreme," Ranger said. "A conversation explaining the situation might be all that you need."

He was right. My mom would have been too mortified over the lost book to think clearly, and my grandmother probably wasn't exactly helpful in the situation. If we went to the library, apologized for grandma, and told them what had probably happened to the book, she might be willing to bend the rules so we could pay the fine and replace it.

"So this morning, when you said you might get puked on," I said. "Did it actually happen?"

"No," he said. "She made it to the alley beside her building. Why?"

"Your keys were covered in something. The button for popping the trunk was stuck down, and I've been driving around all day with the trunk continuously opening. I fixed it, and it seems to be working now."

He held out his hand for the keys. Some of the crusty stuff was still on the keys, and he examined it for a minute. "It's adhesive," he said. "Have you left them unattended at all?"

"No," I said. "The keys have either been in my handbag, or in my pocket all morning."

"When did you first notice the problem?"

"I got an alert that the trunk was open after I bought mom's computer," I said.

"Walk me through your morning?" He said.

So I did. He tossed some bills onto the table and stood up. He motioned for me to follow him and we went to the car. He popped the trunk and looked through the groceries, "Did you forget peanut butter?"

"No," I said. "I know I bought peanut butter."

I fished out my receipt and handed it to Ranger, "See there. Peanut butter."

He did an inventory of the groceries, and said, "Only thing missing is the peanut butter. It didn't get its own bag?"

"No," I said. "Aw fuck he's back?"

"Looks like it," Ranger said. He pulled out his phone, and he made a call, he read off everything on the receipt and hung up the phone. A few minutes later Tank showed up and took my groceries out of the trunk, and put them in the back of his explorer.

"I want to know where Leitrim is, and I want to know the status of the restraining order. He's in violation of it," Ranger said.

Harvey Leitrim was a fan of mine. We don't know why, but he liked to steal my peanut butter, and he was slowly escalating on the creep scale. I mean it took balls to break into Ranger's Porsche to take my peanut butter.

"Ella's going to replace the groceries," Ranger said.

"What's Tank going to do with the ones I bought?"

"Probably feed it to the men. If they contain hallucinogens, it could make for an interesting afternoon."

"Babe," I said. He grinned.


	3. Chapter 3

**AN: Thank you to everyone for reading! I love the reviews so keep them coming. Everything you recognize belongs o JE.**

The last time I was at the library, things didn't go very well for me. I came in, I did some research, and then my car blew up. The girl working at the library was a young woman by the name of Gladys. She was extra friendly, and she was super helpful when my car exploded. She hooked me up with a library card and everything.

Gladys was not working the front desk at the library when we got there. The woman there was named Irene, and Irene could have been a stunt double for Maggie Smith. I say Stunt double and not stand in, because under the cardigan she had tied around her shoulders, she was wearing a sleeveless top, and she had pipes that impressed Ranger. Professor McGonagall was jacked, boys and girls.

When I'd been here before, Gladys had her desk looking a little whimsical with flowers, and stacks of books around her. Irene had books about cyber fraud and posters about avoiding being the victim of phishing schemes.

Ranger walked up to the desk, and she looked up. "Mr. Manoso, what can I do for you?"

"My mother-in-law was in here earlier today and was informed that a book she'd borrowed was significantly overdue. I would like to pay the fine, and cover the cost of replacing the book."

"No," she said.

"May I ask why?"

"Because you were not the one who lost the book, and therefore repayment for the lost book is not your responsibility. The fine is for the person who misplaced the property. You wouldn't serve time for someone else's crime, would you?"

Ranger gave her a look that pretty much said that yes, he had. She cleared her throat and squared her shoulders. "Be that as it may," she said, "I cannot allow this, because I don't know if your mother-in-law has authorized this debt payment."

"She's insisted upon it," Ranger said.

"Do you have a written request?" Irene asked.

"I don't," Ranger said.

"If you get me a written request, I can allow it. What is your mother-in-law's name?"

"Mrs. Helen Plum," Ranger said.

"No," she said.

"I can assure you, that she is," Ranger said.

"I mean no," Irene said, "Even with a written request, I'm not going to allow it."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because when I attempted to explain to her, that I need permission from my supervisor to access the records, she attempted to bribe me, and then her mother pushed a book trolly down a flight of stairs, and when I went to deal with it, she tried to hack into my computer. Quite frankly she's lucky I didn't press charges. If it were up to me, neither one of those women would be allowed onto the premises again."

I put my finger over my left eye to stop the eye twitch that had started. There was no way this was going to be an easy task. She wasn't going to give us the name of the book unless Ranger used creative interrogation methods.

"Would you please contact your supervisor and ask him for permission to release the name of the book to Mrs. Plum, so that she can go about replacing it if necessary?"

"I'm afraid I must disappoint you again, sir," Irene said. "I can't contact him because he is out of the country, and I don't have the name of the place he is staying. The other girl, Gladys, accidentally threw the information out. I mean you would think he would have given us an electronic copy of the information, but the man doesn't have an email address. I mean really. In this day and age."

"What is your supervisor's name?"

"Mr. Mark Duggan," she said.

"Thank you," Ranger said. We left the library, and Ranger called Minnie.

Minnie was his nephew and usually got the grunt research jobs around Rangeman. His name was actually Carlos Manoso and was all round Ranger's Mini-Me. "Stephanie's mother has a book that's overdue from the library, and the librarian, Irene Sporkle, is unable to access the records that will release the information about that book without permission from her Supervisor, Mark Duggan. Mr. Duggan is on vacation, and she isn't sure how to reach him. Get the information for Ms. Sporkle."

He hung up the phone and looked at me. "It might be a good idea to go to Morelli's to look for the book."

"I don't want to," I whined.

"There's a massage in it for you," he said.

I considered that and shook his hand. "Deal."

His phone rang, he answered he listened for a few minutes. "That's a problem. I'll be there in an hour."

He hung up and looked at me. "Julie's at my grandmother's. She's run away from home, and Rachel needs a break. She wants Julie to stay with us for the summer."

"Seriously?" I said.

"There's a boy involved," Ranger said. "Ron doesn't approve of him."

"Uh oh," I said. Ranger started the car and drove back to Haywood, and parked in front of the building.

"I have to make arrangements, and then I'm going to pick her up. I need to say something, and it's important."

I nodded.

"Morelli's guest last night is a client, and there is a personal connection to one of Rangeman's employees. If she is there, become blind and deaf."

"Why?"

"Because the other parties involved will go ballistic," Ranger said. "And I really don't have time for that right now."

"Got it," I said. "Do you think she's still there?"

"No idea," Ranger said, "But when she left this morning, she was only wearing one shoe, it was expensive, so she'll have made contact again to get it back."

"That was what you had to deal with this morning, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. "I didn't want him to check her trackers when he got to the office to find out she was in Morelli's bed."

"Yeah," I said. "That would probably be bad."

"You're okay with this?"

"It's weird," I said. "But yeah."

Ranger gave me a fast kiss and jogged towards the building. "You're not taking the Turbo?"

"You need it," he said. "And we're picking up your car tomorrow morning."

"Ranger," I said, "No."

"I'm getting really tired of being told no," he said.

"You're going to have found me some super expensive car, and it's just going to die. I'm going to go buy a Buick or something."

"Babe," he said.

He went inside, and I got into the driver's seat of the Turbo, grumbling. Then I looked at the clock on the dash. Joe wasn't working, and it was Sunday, which meant that his mother would be at his place cooking and filling his freezer with food for the week. Joe was a busy guy, and he wasn't going to say no to prepared food, even if he was a better than decent cook himself and didn't actually need his mother to cook for him. If Joe was going to have a second night with a woman, he wasn't going to do it with his mother in the house. He would go to the woman's house. I cruised by Joe's place and didn't see his Jeep in the driveway. I didn't see his mother's car either, but that didn't mean she wasn't there.

Conundrum. Did I risk running into Angie Morelli without interference from Joe? What if Bella was with her, helping her cook? It's possible one of Joe's siblings drove her over. The light was on in the front room. Nope, I'd cruise by again later. It was safer that way.

I went back to Rangeman, and parked on the street, and entered through the front doors. Connie was playing Free Cell on her computer and sucking on a frappuccino.

"Busy?"

"I can't tell you how much I'm not," Connie said. Connie was a little older than me, a little shorter, with bigger hair and a bigger chest than I had. "I'm fucking bored Steph. B-O-R-E-D."

"Want to help me with something?" I asked.

"What?"

"Mr. Dickerson's wife hired me to see if he's having an affair."

"Really?" Connie said. "He seems like such a normal, stand up guy."

"Want to help me do some digging? I'm doing this for mom, so I'm not going to pull one of the guys off of something, but since you're doing nothing…"

"I'll start a computer search, and then I'll start making some calls," Connie said.

We spent the next three hours going through everything we could find about Mr. Dickerson. Most of it was just stuff about being a good teacher. His facebook was no help, it was all stuff about classwork and hadn't been updated since June, and it was about summer experiment ideas that could be used for extra credit. Nothing about his family, and no pictures of him with a girl.

He coached Little League in the summer and was the coach of the Mathletes in during the school year. He also was a member of a bowling league. That was all that the regular internet seemed to turn up about him.

A little further digging showed the insurance payout that had come from his great Aunt. It was to the tune of $150,000, and he'd used fifty grand of that to restock his classroom with school supplies and new textbooks. He'd used another twenty for a European cruise, he paid off his Volvo, and the rest he put into a savings account.

The insurance issue Ranger became involved with was under a different insurance provider, so there was no relationship between them that I could see. There were no weird purchases on his credit cards, no unusual bank activity. His credit history was excellent. So if he was having an affair, she was footing the bill. The gossip mill didn't turn out anything either.

We did a quick search about Steveston and that more than tracked. It was an exceptionally affluent neighborhood. Think upscale Stars Hollow from the Gilmore Girls. Instead of quaint New England houses, you had a lot of colonial mansions.

"Well it's a good thing I'm getting a new car," I said. "I think we're going to need it, so we don't stand out there."

Connie nodded. I looked at my watch, and it was a little after five. Angie would for sure be gone from Morelli's by then. She would be at home cooking for whichever of her children would be coming over for dinner that night. Connie looked at her watch and yawned. "I'm calling it a night."

"Are you in tomorrow?"

"Yeah," she said. "I'm taking Thursday and Friday off, so I get an extra long weekend."

She walked outside, and I followed her to Ranger's car. A little while later I pulled up in front of Morelli's and saw his Jeep in the driveway, and I could hear the sounds of a ball game coming through the open window at the front of his house. Good deal. The Mets were playing, which meant that he was probably not upstairs with a woman.

I went to the front door and knocked just in case, and didn't get an answer, which might also mean he was sleeping in front of the baseball game. I could smell his mother's spaghetti carbonara, and my stomach rumbled. There was little in this world that tasted better than that, and a small part of me wondered if it was bad form to ask for leftovers. I let myself in the front door and said hello to Bob.

"Joe?" I called.

The television was on in the living room, and I was about to walk through, when I heard an echo of the game coming from upstairs, and realized it was coming from the television in his bedroom. "Not to be rude," a woman's voice said, "But get rid of her; I'm horny, Detective."

Abort Stephanie. Abort. You don't want this information. You want this information deleted from your brain. You don't want to know that, that woman was upstairs. Maybe if I poked at my brain through my ear with a Q-Tip, I might be able to press a delete button or something.

Joe came down the stairs, sporting a lipgloss that wasn't his own on his lips, and his hair looked like someone had been running their fingers through it. I knew who the someone was, and I wanted to un-know it.

I'm not sure exactly what the hell I said, as I stumbled through the conversation, wishing I'd just decided to hell with it when it came to the book. But I couldn't. It was there now. Joe handed me a laundry basket of my stuff, and I left.

I went out to the car, and put my head against the steering wheel. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. It would have to be her. It made total sense really. It would have to be her. I punched Ranger's number on my phone, and he answered on the second ring.

"Are you in the car?"

"Yes."

"Are you on speaker?"

"Yes."

"Is Julie with you?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"What does that mean?"

"She's wearing noise-canceling headphones, and she's refusing to acknowledge that I exist."

"So it's safe to talk?"

"Yes."

"MOLLY?!" I shouted into the phone.

"I take it she's at Morelli's?"

"Oh yeah, and do you know how much I didn't want to know that? Do you know how much I don't want to have a conversation with Lester about this? He's going to want to know what the hell Joe is probably doing to her, so he can use it to fuel his revenge when he slowly kills Morelli."

"Babe."

"What am I supposed to do Ranger? There is no way this is going to be secret. My mom has probably already heard. Molly is exactly the sort of woman that Angie Morelli is looking for in a daughter-in-law, and she'll be bragging. Lester is going to have kittens. Little deranged psycho kittens that he'll train to castrate Joe for touching Molly."

"Babe."

"You're enjoying this far too much."

"Pretty hard not to. The images you're conjuring are somewhat entertaining."

"Okay," I said, "You're going to do me a huge favor. MASSIVE."

"I'm listening."

"You're going to tell Lester that you're keeping it from me, so I don't do a massive nutty and get all jealous. You're going to tell Lester he's protecting me until I'm ready to hear it."

"What's in it for me?"

"Whatever you want…within reason."

"Done."

My phone beeped letting me know he'd disconnected.

 _AN: So Molly and Joe... there's a whole story that takes place at the same time as this... if you're interested...And if you're not, just know that it's what Ranger has to deal with on the side later._


	4. Chapter 4

**AN: Thank you to everyone for reading, and a special thank you to everyone who has reviewed. I'm in the land of limited internet, which means I can't respond to all of you just now, but I'd like to say I really do appreciate the feedback so keep it coming. I don't know if I'll be able to post next week, but I'll see what I can do!**

Ranger came home about twenty minutes after I did, and he was without Julie. "Where's the kid?"

"Staying on four, across the hall from Minnie."

"Why is she there?" I asked.

"We don't have room for her up here, and believe me, we don't want her sleeping on the sofa," Ranger said.

"So what's the deal?" I asked.

"With Julie, or Molly?"

"Julie," I said. "I'm not thinking about Molly. I want to know nothing about this until I absolutely have to. That way I can't say anything under interrogation."

"You're blowing this out of proportion."

"I bet you I'm not," I said.

Ranger grinned. "If I'm right, you change the terms of your favor."

"How?"

"Take away the 'within reason.'"

My blood pressure spiked, and the room temperature went up about forty degrees. "Okay." I squeaked. I was pretty sure Lester was going to freak, and that the bet was safe, but who knew. He might be totally cool about it.

Ranger chuckled.

"What's the deal with Julie?" I asked.

"She has a boyfriend who got busted last week on a possession charge, and he's out on bail. Rachel and Ron won't let her see him again. She decided to ditch them at the airport, and she took a cab to my grandmother's. She wants to live with me because I'm not going to be prejudiced against him because he smokes a little weed."

"She got what she wanted, so why is she pissed at you?"

"Because I showed her his papers, and told her that if he violated his bond and came anywhere near New Jersey, I was more than happy to bring him back to Florida to collect the money for hauling his ass in. I also told her that it wasn't a free ride and she'd be working here for the summer."

"Is this like a rehab facility for wayward family members?"

"It was a mistake hiring Lester; it set a precedent," Ranger said. I grinned.

"What is she going to be doing?"

"Data entry for Hector," Ranger said.

"Is that a good idea?" I asked. "Hector is pretty scary."

"She knows Hector," Ranger said. "She'll be fine."

"She's downstairs now?" I asked.

"Looking at paint colors with Ella. I told her she could paint her apartment before she started work. She'll be up for dinner."

Ranger leaned up against the kitchen cupboards and folded his arms. About two seconds later Lunch Box climbed up onto the counter and tapped politely on Ranger's hand with his little claw, and Ranger looked down and then picked up his bird, and put him on his shoulder.

"He's only ever that polite with you, you know that right?" I said.

"It's not all that surprising," Ranger said, "I raised him."

Our custody of Lunch Box was supposed to be temporary, but I had a suspicion that it was temporary like my babysitting job of Bob was temporary. In other words, permanent. The bird loved Ranger. Sure he was foul-mouthed and liked to wake me up by pulling my hair when Ranger wasn't in the apartment, but he was endearing with his inability to fly, and his pink feathers. He was damned smart too, and a good guard bird. A little while ago, he went apeshit on a beer bottle that had been tampered with by a creepy assassin who wanted to contact me. Ranger had put us both in the shower to hide while he swept the apartment, and here was zero doubt in my mind that if anyone but Ranger had come into that shower, Lunch Box would have protected me. Given his claws and a beak that could quickly destroy a walnut with the same ease he decimated a banana, he wasn't an insignificant threat.

"So this car I'm getting tomorrow, what is it?"

"Another Turbo," Ranger said.

"Isn't that going to get confusing?"

"Not really," he said.

"We're going to have the same keys Ranger," I said.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a chunky silver keychain and handed it to me. Four big block letters welded together that said, 'Babe'. It weighed a tonne.

"Well that solves that problem, and if necessary I can use the keychain as weight next time I have to hit someone."

"Or you could use it to punch out a car window," he said.

"Very practical," I said.

"That's my middle name."

"It should be," I said.

"Banana, Bitch!" Lunch Box said.

He meant me. He wanted me to get him the banana. "Manners," Ranger said.

"Banana, Sunshine," Lunch Box said.

I rolled my eyes and got the banana off of the top of the fridge, and Lunch Box did a controlled fall off of Ranger's shoulder, and onto the floor. He did his funny little bobbing walk to his perch and climbed up it, where I gave him half of the banana, and broke off a chunk for Rex, who was sleeping in his soup can. I mean yes, it was the same thing they had for breakfast, but neither of them seemed to be complaining.

"So Connie and I turned up less than nothing about Dickerson, on the computer. I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time tailing him."

"You're going to want to use one of the Explorers for that."

"Why?" I asked.

"They don't stand out, and a 9-11 Turbo does, and Dickerson knows I drive one."

"Fair enough," I said.

"Besides, I've had separate cooling units installed in the explorers, so my people don't die of heat stroke on stakeouts, and the car batteries don't go flat."

"That's thoughtful," I said.

"I don't want to get sued," Ranger said.

"Your men wouldn't sue you," I said.

"Their families might," he said. "There's no gossip about him around the Burg?"

"None," I said, "He's a stand-up guy. Almost everybody has a story about how he helped them through some hurdle in school. The worst we've been able to find out about him is that he doesn't really think the words 'No Parking' apply to him. I am going to do some asking around tomorrow but honestly, it just doesn't feel right. If he was the type of guy to have an affair with a student, I'd have known."

"Why?" Ranger asked.

"Because I went to high school," I said. "And every girl hears about this stuff. Mr. Whosit only gives A's to girls endowed with C's and D's. Mr. Guy will make you sit in the front row if you wear a short skirt or a low cut shirt. Make sure you pad your sports bra if you have co-ed gym with Mr. Dude because if you get cold, he'll make a big deal about it.

It's a piss off, but it's a reality and girls tend to pass this shit on to each other, even if it's just speculation. Then there's the fact that he was cute when I went to school and half of the girls in my class had a massive crush on him, and teenaged girls are better than the FBI at digging up information about a guy they have a crush on. Even in the days before social media. If he was the kind of guy to sleep with a student, it would have been everywhere."

"There's a first time for everything," Ranger said.

"Yeah," I said, "But he wouldn't be good at hiding it. Mrs. Dickerson suspects something, but nobody else does and when was the last time you heard of an affair where the spouse was the first to know?"

"Never," Ranger said.

"I'm going to follow him tomorrow," I said. "So picking up my new car can wait."

"No," Ranger said. "I'm practicing some optimism. This car will be the one that makes it."

"Whatever you say," I said.

The next morning I got up at 8:00 and had a bowl of cereal with Julie. She was acting like the girl I knew, all excited about the colors her apartment was being painted today, and how she and Ella were choosing curtains, and decorations for the place. It sounded like the most un-Rangeman like place you could imagine. Definitely very teenaged girl.

"What are you doing today?" she asked me.

"Following around my old Science teacher to see if he's having an affair," I said.

"Fun," Julie said. "Can I come?"

"I'd say yes because it's probably going to be boring, but Ranger has plans for you today, I think."

"Coffee?" I looked down at the floor at Lunch Box. The bird looked like he needed a coffee. He had bedhead and he was looking at the rope nailed to the counter so he could climb up it like it was a torture device. I bent down and picked him up and put some Froot Loops on the counter for him instead. "Fuckin' A."

Julie stared at him. "You've met Lunch Box," I said, "He was at our wedding."

"I didn't know he'd come to live with you guys. He's so cool! Can I pet him."

"Sure," I said.

Julie reached out and smoothed some of Lunch Box's feathers. The bird started purring. "He's really smart, maybe you can teach him some manners this summer."

I went to the fridge and got him some berries to go with his cereal and went downstairs to tell Ranger I was alive. He was just hanging up the phone when I walked in. "So are we ready to go get this show on the road?"

"Yes," Ranger said. "How's Julie?"

"Bonding with the bird."

"Progress then," Ranger said.

"She seemed pleasant enough this morning," I said.

"That's because you haven't done anything to discipline her. Give it time."

I shrugged and helped myself to a coffee in the break room before we went down to Ranger's 911. We got into the front seat, and twenty minutes later we pulled up to the Porsche lot. "So here is the deal. We're driving this car from here, to Haywood, where it'll be picked up by Al and turned into a tank. So as long as you can get it home safe, we're fine. I figure the timing is good because you've got no cases besides Dickerson, and you haven't pissed anyone off in a while."

"You're right. My cars only die when I stick my nose into stuff," I said.

We got out of Ranger's car, and he walked me over to a turquoise 9-11.

"It's not black," I said.

"It's called Miami Blue," Ranger said. I stared at it in awe. It's was so fucking pretty. Ranger's cars were sexy, and sleek and black and so very Ranger, but this car was a-fucking-dorable. It was absolutely, 100%, love at first sight. I knew it would have everything I needed on it, and I'd driven enough of them by now to know I loved the ride.

The dealer brought me the keys, and I got into the car and sighed. It had a tan and Bordeaux leather interior instead of all black. In fact, the only black on the whole car seemed to be the matt black rims, the tires and a little, like eyeliner, around the lights.

"Do you need a moment," Ranger asked.

"I love it," I said.

He chuckled. I'd be resigned for this whole drive like I was being driven to an execution or something. Ranger signed some paperwork and left me to my ride. He took the long way home, hopping onto the interstate so I could open up the taps a bit on my car, and then we drove back to the garage. I parked in my space, and as a joke, or what I think was probably maybe a joke, but could have been a sensible precaution, Tank put traffic cones in the spaces around the car, and behind it.

I couldn't wait to drive it around. I was actually kind of sad that I was going to have to wait until it came back from Al's before I got to drive it again, but knew that it was for the best. I stood beside it, resisting the urge to lick it to declare ownership when the elevator doors to the garage opened.

Lester stormed out of the elevator, followed immediately by Bobby, who burst out of the stairwell sporting a bit of a fat lip. "What's going on?" I asked.

Lester got into one of the big armored pickup trucks, and started it, locking the doors. "You need to chill man. I told you yesterday that she was better off…" Bobby shouted but was cut off as he jumped away from the truck when Lester slammed it into reverse. Ranger snagged me around the waist, and half threw me away from my new car as Lester drove full speed in reverse, directly into the back of the Porsche, crumpling it against the wall like an accordion.

I was frozen with a combination of despair and rage. I stared in utter disbelief at the wreck, as Ranger hauled Lester out of the car.

"Are you okay?" Ranger asked.

Lester went off in Spanish, and Ranger waited for a pause and said, "I'm aware of the situation."

"And you didn't tell me?" Lester took a swing at Ranger, and let's just say it didn't go well for Lester. It ended with Ranger marching Lester into Rangeman for a timeout.

Bobby got into the truck and drove it away from the Porsche, the paint on the truck was barely scratched. My brand new, beautiful little car was toast. A complete write off.

"What the hell happened?" I asked Bobby.

"Molly has a boy over," Bobby said. "It would be fine except Lester was on monitor duty this morning, and from how they were acting, and the sound of what he was saying, he wasn't there for her excellent coffee."

"You have cameras in her apartment?" I said.

"No, just the store, but she lives above it, and if she leaves the door open, we can sometimes pick up what's going on inside the apartment."

"Damn," I said.

"Usually all we hear are the sounds of TV, and the vacuum when she's cleaning. She doesn't have a lot of company that isn't Lester."

Well, I won that bet; a fact I would happily remind Ranger of while he punished Lester. It would inspire the punishment.


	5. Chapter 5

_**AN: Hi I'm back after my little brief hiatus. Vacation got in the way of posting, sorry about that! Anyway here is the next chapter. I hope you enjoy and thanks for your reviews!**_

After Lester had cooled down, been suitably punished, and forced to apologize to his sister for being a dick, Ranger ordered me my new car... again...and parked me in a Mercedes G-Class, that had been retrofitted by the same people who build the President's limos. This thing could drive right over a bomb, and all that would happen was there'd be a hole in the ground because the earth gave way to the explosion and the car didn't.

Once Connie and I were installed in this vehicle, and feeling a bit conspicuous, I drove to Dickerson's house in Hamilton Square.

When I was a kid, I used to wish we could live in this neighborhood because I'd somehow acquired the knowledge that the area was named after Alexander Hamilton during the War of 1812, but before that had been called Nottingham, and I liked the Robin Hood Connection.

Whenever we drove through Hamilton Square, I'd pretend I could see the Sheriff of Nottingham hiding in alleyways. Not someone dressed as the Sheriff mind you. Not even Alan Rickman, no I was looking for the big grey wolf from the Disney cartoon. I had a massive crush on Fox Robin Hood, and as a result, if I thought I'd seen the big grey wolf, I'd get all aflutter because I thought Robin would probably be just around the corner.

I'm not going to lie, I was still sort of on the lookout. You don't forget your first love.

Ranger wanted to live in a gated community, and I understood that, but I did like the vibe here. It felt really friendly. The kind of neighborhood where you expect to see bikes on the lawn, and neighbors squabbling over who borrowed who's lawn mower. There were pools in backyards, and trees lining the streets. It was nice.

The Dickersons' Ranch house had a pretty garden out front, and wisteria climbing the side of their garage. It was in full bloom with purple flowers threatening to take over. Dickerson's car, was still the Volvo XC-60 he'd bought ten years prior, and it was looking a little dated, but well loved. His wife drove a sporty little blue Mazda that reminded me of my long lost Miata.

I parked across the street, and got comfortable, watching the house. I knew he was home because mom had called Bernadette and she'd told her that he was mowing the lawn out back. It was summertime, and he wasn't teaching every day.

At about noon, I saw him kiss his wife goodbye on his front step, smile, and then jog down to his Volvo. I'd stuck a tracking dot to it so I could let him drive away, and let him get a few blocks away before I left the curb and followed him out of Hamilton Square to a coffee shop where he got out, went inside, ordered and sat down. He put on some headphones, scrolled through some stuff on his phone, and then started doing a crossword puzzle. Sometimes he'd stop to make a note of something in a notebook on the table beside him, and sometimes he'd get up to go to the bathroom, but he stayed in that coffee shop, eating cookies, and drinking coffee until 5:30 when he got up and went back out to his car, and drove to the supermarket. He picked up stuff to make dinner and drove home.

I texted Bernadette to tell her to tell me if he left home again, and went home. The tracking dot on his car didn't budge all night, and thus began the most boring stakeout in the history of stakeouts.

Every day he would leave his house between ten and noon, and he would drive to a different coffee shop. He had six different haunts, and each one had been assigned a different day of the week, and a different task. On Mondays it was crosswords, on Tuesday he read Science textbooks and worked on lesson plans, on Wednesday he did Sudoku, on Thursday he read a novel, on Friday he read a different book, on Saturday he hung out with his wife, and on Sunday he spent four hours reading the paper.

I spent nearly the entire month of July following him, and never once did he go anywhere late at night. Then, on the first of August, I got a call from Bernadette. He was going out after eight. I found his car on the GPS, hopped into Ranger's 9-11, and swung round to Connie's to pick her up so we could follow him out to Stevestown.

The house we parked in front of was a sprawling Victorian mansion with a gabled roof, gingerbread trim, and brown shingled roof. There was no gate in front of the house, and in the middle of the circular driveway, there was a pretty pond covered in blooming water Lillies. Wisteria (that looked a lot like the ones on Dickerson's house) covered more than half of the stone-walled house.

There was no sign of Dickerson out front, so Connie and I went around to the side of the house to see if we could peep in some windows. It turned out that it wasn't necessary as Dickerson and a girl who looked to be in her mid to late teens were sitting on the back patio having what appeared to be a pleasant conversation. Connie and I ducked behind a big hydrangea bush to watch the interaction.

The girl was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of flip-flops. Her hair was in pigtails, and she was smiling happily at Dickerson, who was nursing a glass of wine while reading something on an iPad. "You're sure about this?"

She nodded eagerly. "I want to run one more set of numbers, and then I want to bring it to the coach. What do you think?"

"I think on paper it's a good predictive test," Dickerson said. "Let's do a real-world test."

She opened a laptop on the table and entered in some data, Dickerson read it, and nodded, "And this is your margin of error?"

She nodded.

He entered something into the computer, and she stood up and peeled off her t-shirt, revealing a two-piece racing swimsuit. The top was a short sleeved rash guard in bright orange green and blue and went as far as her rib cage. The bottoms were compression briefs that matched the rash guard. She zipped the rash guard and got onto a racing block on the edge of the pool.

Dickerson stood beside the pool at mid-distance, holding a clipboard and a stopwatch with a whistle in his mouth. She got ready to start, and he blew the whistle. She launched off of the diving board and dove into the pool. He looked at a mark on the edge of the pool and made a note on the board, and when she reached the other end of the pool he made another note. She swam eight lengths of the pool, climbed out, and took a towel Dickerson was holding for her.

"You swim faster with the rash guard than with the other top," Dickerson said.

"I know," she said, "I think it's because I'm less afraid of popping out of it when I dive into the pool. It's less of a distraction."

"Get a one piece," Dickerson said.

"They give me wedgies. I've actually factored comfort into my calculations because of it. For me, this is the quickest suit."

They went to the computer and Dickerson entered the data he'd collected into the program and he grinned. "Sadie, this math is incredible."

"I think I need to expand my test group. I'm going to speak to the coach at the pool tomorrow. I'm a triathlete so I train differently and I need to know if this model will work in more traditional swimming competitions."

"It's a good idea," Dickerson said.

I looked at Connie and we shared a combined sigh of relief. This was just Dickerson helping some kid with her math homework. This had nothing to do with an affair. Connie had taken some pictures, and we were getting ready to leave when we heard voices, coming towards the back of the house.

A woman of about Dickerson's age, with chemically assisted Burgundy hair, came onto the patio and helped herself to a glass of wine. With her was a preppy-looking young man with neatly coifed blonde hair. He walked over to Sadie and tugged one of her blonde pigtails. "You look like a little kid," he said.

"I know," she said with a grin and stood on her toes and kissed him. Connie took a picture of that as well. He kissed her back and went to the table and picked up what turned out to be an engagement ring and put it on her left hand.

"How are the wedding plans going?" Dickerson asked.

"Good," Sadie said.

"Sadie hasn't picked a dress yet, because she's been too caught up in this stuff," the woman said.

"I told mom, that I'm going to New York on Thursday. I've had the appointment for weeks, but mom doesn't understand why I don't just pick a designer and have him or her come here."

"Well, why don't you?"

"Because it's needlessly wasteful and ostentatious mom. As it is I'm probably spending a fortune on a dress. Xander and I would rather spend that money on an incredible honeymoon."

"It's true Abby," Xander said.

She rolled her eyes and tasted the wine again, and looked at Dickerson, "Is this yours?"

"No," he said, "Sadly. It's delicious though."

"I liked that last bottle you brought," she said.

"Thanks," Dickerson said, and Abby sat down.

"What are you two up to this weekend?" Abby asked. "Would you like to come for dinner?"

"We can't," Sadie said. "We're re-tiling the kitchen, and then Xander and I are going to be sampling cakes. It's going to be fun."

Xander gave Sadie's backside a pat, "Go change. We're going to be late."

Sadie went inside and came back outside a few minutes later, dressed in a cute little dress, with her hair still in the pigtails. Xander rolled his eyes and took the elastics out of her braids and shook them out. "I'm going to get arrested if I kiss you in public with your hair like this."

"Oh please," Sadie said. She took his hand and waved to Dickerson and Abby and they left.

As soon as they were gone, Dickerson's demeanour changed from relaxed and happy, to anything but. He folded his arms and put his head on the table.

"It's going to be okay, Wally," Abby said.

"I sincerely doubt that," Dickerson said. "I know she thinks I'm having an affair, and I just... I can't live like this anymore. It's been over twenty years."

"You did the right thing then, and you're doing the right thing now."

"Was it?" He said. "Really?"

"Yes," he said.

"Look at what I gave up, what I sacrificed for that one conversation."

"Come inside, Wally," Abby said. "You're no good to your wife like this. It'll get better. We'll find a solution."

Dickerson nodded, and they packed up the computer equipment and went into the house. Connie and I snuck back to the Mercedes and got in it, and drove back to Trenton.

There was no point in continuing the investigation. We had our answer. No affair. Except now I needed to know what was going on. Why was he so upset?

"Well weeks of doing nothing but watch a guy listen to music and do puzzles in coffee shops did actually bear fruit," Connie asked. "My faith in humanity is sort of restored. You don't think he's having an affair with the mother?"

"I didn't get that vibe. I think they are actually just friends."

"Yeah," Connie said. "But what do we tell Bernadette? She hired us to find out if he was having an affair. He's not. Do we really want to dig into whatever else he's got going on?"

"I don't know," I said.

I dropped Connie off at her house and went upstairs to find Ranger in his office on five. I knocked on his door, and showed him the pictures. "He's not having an affair," I said.

"You're sure?"

"Yup," I said, and flopped down in his guest chair. I told him about our night, and what we found out.

"What are the names of the women?"

"Sadie, and Abby Moore," I said.

Ranger ran a search on them, with their street address. "Abby is short for Abigail, and she gave birth to Sadie in June of 1993. The father's name on the birth certificate is listed as Finnegan Moore. Finnegan Moore was working in New York in 2001, he escaped the North Tower before it collapsed but died four years later due to complications from his proximity during the collapse of the tower."

"There is something fishy about this though, Ranger. As far as Bernadette is concerned he's working when he leaves the house, and we know he's not. He's obviously close to the Moores, but if he's as close with them as he looks, but it's not an affair, why is it a secret? Why doesn't Bernadette know about it?"

"That's not what you were hired to find out," he said. "You know he's not having an affair. You tell her what you've found, what's going on at the house, and you show her the pictures. If she wants you to pursue it, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it."

"So I just tell him she's the daughter of a friend, and there's no affair."

"We show her the pictures of the two of them working, and of Sadie with her fiancé. What was the fiancé's name?"

"Xander something," I said. Ranger did some more typing and waited a minute.

"Alexander Green," Ranger said. "There's an engagement announcement in the Times. Green is the founder of an alternative energy company that is giving Elon Musk a run for his money, so he's aptly named."

"Anything about him that strikes you as suspicious?"

"Not on the surface, no," Ranger said. More typing produced more information, and he said, "She's a graduate student at Linton University in Boston, which is the University Dickerson attended. She's doing research into the application of certain advanced sabermetric principals in the analysis of other sports. Specifically swimming. Which tracks with what you were looking at. And… she references Dickerson's own graduate paper. You've spent three weeks on this and this is the first time they've made contact. And according to her Facebook she's been spending a lot of time at the shore. If she were having an affair with him, it's the most half-assed affair in history."

"I agree," I said. Ranger helped me type up a report, and I planned to take it to Bernadette tomorrow when Dickerson was out of the house. Job done case closed. Thanks for reading. Except… my life doesn't work that way.


	6. Chapter 6

_**AN: Thanks to all of you who have read, reviewed, favorited, and followed this story! Here is the next installment, please enjoy! Sadly, with the exception of the mistakes, everything belongs to Janet.**_

I wrote up my report, and I included the pictures we'd taken in it. I emailed a copy of it to Connie, and I went to bed. I woke up the next morning to the feel of little claws on my chest. "Good morning, Beautiful," Lunch Box said.

"Umm hi," I said. "Ranger must be home."

I sat up, and Lunch Box climbed up onto the top of my head.

"I don't need your help going to the bathroom," I said.

I reached up to take him down, and he lunged at my finger and dug his nails into my scalp.

"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," Lunch Box said. I walked out to the kitchen where Ranger was sitting at the counter eating a bowl of granola and yogurt.

"Why does the bird sound like Clark Gable?" I asked. "Oh and help?"

Ranger walked over and relieved me of Lunch Box and put him down on the counter. The bird looked at Ranger's cereal with loathing. I felt him. It appeared pretty boring. The bird looked balefully at me, and I brought the fruit bowl down and plopped it onto the counter. "Go nuts."

It was Christmas for the bird as he jumped into the bowl, and started massacring some grapes.

"Didn't sleep well?" Ranger asked.

"No," I said. "I kept having weird-assed dreams about an accordion that was shaped like a car, and people timing how long it takes me to eat a bowl of Froot Loops."

"I told you that a peanut butter and olive sandwich before bed was a bad idea," Ranger said.

"I was hungry," I said. Ranger smiled at me, and we were interrupted by my phone ringing. It was Bernadette calling. "Hello?"

"Stephanie! Oh, I wish I'd never hired you!" she wailed so loud that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. "I don't know how he knows, but he knows you've been following him for weeks. When he came home last night, he told me that he wasn't having an affair, but something was going on, and he couldn't tell me about it. He told me he was tired of living like this, and he just left. I don't know what to do."

"That's all he said?" I asked.

"He said that he had to fix some things and then he was coming back. He said he'd tell me everything once he knew it was safe, but if he didn't come back this morning, I had to tell you about the Black Socks."

"The 1919 White Socks?" I asked.

"No," she said. "It's a file on his computer called the Black Socks. He said everything you would need was on there."

"What's in the file?"

"I don't know," she said. "It's password protected."

"I'll be right there," I said. I hung up and looked at Ranger. "Dickerson is missing."

"Let's go," Ranger said. I looked at the fruit massacre on the counter. "Leave it; we'll deal with it later."

Half an hour later we were parked in the Dickersons' driveway. Bernadette was waiting for us on the front steps, and she didn't look well. She was sweating profusely, shivering, and pale as a ghost. Ranger jogged up the steps and scooped her up like she weighed nothing because she probably really didn't weigh much and he carried her straight through the house, to her bedroom and put her on the bed. He went into the bathroom and came out with a sleeve of some kind and put a needle on something that looked like an insulin pen a diabetic might use. He jabbed it into her leg, right through her slacks, and depressed the plunger.

He pulled his phone out and called Bobby, and told him to get to us, ASAP, and then he put a blood pressure cuff on Bernadette. "What did you just give her?" I asked.

"It's a cocktail of medication she has to take when she has an episode. She's having one now."

She was already almost completely unconscious. "What do we do?"

"We watch her until Bobby gets here and we hope that she doesn't have a seizure, or a stroke before he does. If she doesn't, then the medication is working and we'll get a nurse to watch her, if she does, she'll need an ambulance."

For twenty tense minutes, we waited for Bobby, who came in and took over assessing Bernadette. "What's going to happen to her?" I asked.

"Her pain receptors are going to activate, and she's going to be in agony until the episode passes. If it's bad enough, they will induce a coma until it's over," Ranger said. "Bernadette isn't going to be able to help us on this one any time soon."

"How long do the episodes last?"

"Depends on how bad it gets," Ranger said. Bernadette suddenly went rigid and started seizing. Bobby kicked us out of the room and Ranger called 911.

"What does she have?" I asked.

"I don't know if it has a name. She has an orphan disease, which means that in the world there are probably only two or three cases of it."

We waited for the ambulance and Bobby rode with them to the hospital taking control of her care. Ranger and I were left looking at the debris left over in her room after the paramedics had taken her away. Between the two of us we cleaned up the mess, and Ranger took the garbage out to the street.

The Dickersons' house was neat and had last been updated sometime in the mid-nineties. The walls were a pale lemon yellow, there was oak everywhere, all of the hardware on the cabinets was brass, and there were faux granite Formica countertops in the kitchen.

There was neatly vacuumed wall to wall carpeting in the sunken living room, and in the bedroom, but oak floors everywhere else. Ranger and I went through each room, on the top two levels, and found a sewing room, a guest room, the master bedroom, but nowhere that might be used as an office, and we didn't see any computers.

We went down to the basement and found a large flatscreen television, some damned comfortable looking Lazy Boys and a wet-bar but again no office. Everything in the Dickerson house seemed relatively normal, so we searched in the backyard.

We found Dickerson's office in a pretty little garden shed. It was a cute little granny cottage with window boxes filled with annuals, and inside there were shelves dedicated to science books, his desk and, a bank of filing cabinets. The drawers were for his tutoring, his fantasy baseball league, and finally his teaching. On the desk was his laptop, some calculators, different binders labeled with curriculums and lesson plans for each grade he taught, and then empty trays for each grade, labeled, 'to be marked' and 'marked.'

I sat down at his desk and found a folder on his computer labeled Black Socks. It was password protected, and after trying things like his address, Shoeless Joe, Bernadette, and anything else I could think of, we decided that it would be better just to give it to Hector to crack.

We looked through the rest of his man cottage, and I flipped through lesson plans. I didn't find anything except a couple of pretty cool experiments planned for September. He had a couple of ideas for new clubs to start at school, like a coding club, and a Selfie contest that he wanted to organize so that at the end of the year the school could crown the selfie King and Queen. From his emails it looked like he was being considered for a Vice Principal position when the current VP retired, so he had everything going for him.

"I want to go check his coffee shops," I said. "And then what?"

"I'm going to have someone sit on the hospital, someone on the house and then you and I are going to watch the Moore House."

By noon Hector was working on cracking open the file on the computer, and Ranger and I were sitting in front of the Moore house. When Connie and I were staking out Dickerson, we'd stashed a handheld gaming system in the glove box of the car, and we took turns playing with it to numb the boredom. Somehow I doubted Ranger was going to be cool with that.

I've been living up close and personal with Ranger for a while, and one of the things that I've learned about him is that he meditates every morning. That's no surprise, but there is a definite difference between the way he looks when he's meditating and when he's concentrating, and I'm pretty sure the reason he always seems so zen on stakeouts is that he's meditating. I bet his resting heart rate was somewhere around nine. To satisfy my curiosity, I pressed the button on his watch that gave me a readout of his heart rate, and it came back at 42.

"Wow," I said. "You're in really good shape."

He smirked and looked at me. "You're just noticing this now?"

"No, I'm just saying that considering your love of cheese and bacon fries, I thought it would be a little higher."

"I give in to that temptation once a month, at most. It's not going to have any real long-term effects," Ranger said. I took his watch off and put it on me. His telemetry on his computer was going to spazz when I put my numbers in. A minute later it kicked out the reading of 80 BPM.

"Is this bad?"

"It's normal, and not bad considering you're stressed and on your fourth cup of coffee today."

"Well, what would get your heart rate this high?"

"Those shorts you were wearing yesterday," he said. And that was pretty much the extent of our conversation for the next half an hour. It was okay though. I had a plan.

When the book went missing, everyone, including myself found it hard to believe that I had been in possession of a novel of some kind, for recreational reading purposes. I decided I needed to be more well read, but reading just wasn't my thing. So I decided that I'd make a list of all of the books I was curious about and downloaded them all in audiobook form. So over the last few weeks, I'd been through Sherlock Holmes and a little Jane Austen. The next book on my list was one of those books that on the dust jacket felt like it was cheesy, but everyone assured me that it was excellent so I was trying it. It was about a Victorian-era woman who gets caught in a storm on her way to the Caribbean and wakes up shipwrecked in the South Pacific in the 18th century. She gets picked up by Privateers, just before a mutiny on board the ship.

The Captain is killed, and she and the first mate end up marooned. She tells him where she's from, and what happened, and she tries to remember everything she can about this particular mutiny from her history books.

I fished my auxiliary cable out of my bag, and shove it into the dash, turned on the radio and started the book. Ranger responded by flicking a switch on the dash. "What's that?"

"Runs the radio off of a solar panel instead of the car battery," he said.

I didn't think he was paying any attention to it, as we sat watching the house for hours, but I was utterly engrossed in the book. At four Ranger picked my phone up and paused the story just as the main character told the first mate that she knew where the mutineers from the Bounty were hiding. The plan was to get to Pitcairn Island where they could hopefully seize the Bounty and sail it back to England before Christian, and his Crew set fire to it.

Ranger pulled his phone out of his pocket and answered a call. "Where are you? Fine."

He hung up and looked at my phone, downloaded the app I was using to listen to the book and had me log into it on his phone. I guess Ranger was into the story too.

"What's up?" I asked.

"I have to go to New York City," he said. "Connie and Tank are on their way, and you're going to swap places with Tank."

So a few minutes later, Tank pulled up behind us. I got out of the Cayenne, and into Connie's car with her. "What no Explorer?" I asked.

"Nope," Tank said, "They are all out on another job."

"Damn," I said.

"It's okay," Connie said. "Lester's hooked us up."

She got out of the car and got something out of the trunk. It was one of those windshield covers that blocked the sun and supposedly kept the car cool. Together we got it into position, and then Connie pointed out an electric cooler in the back that was hooked up to its own car battery. "Popsicles and water. We're good to go."

I glanced dubiously at it and then watched as Ranger and Tank drove off in their gloriously cold vehicle.

"It's going to get really hot in here," I said. "Maybe we should move to some shade?"

"Bathrooms are located where?" Connie said, ignoring my suggestion.

"A five-minute walk that way," I pointed over my shoulder and plugged my phone in. "Question. How the hell are we supposed to watch the street if there's a giant cardboard screen in front of us?"

"Oh," Connie said, "Lester has that covered too. We have a dash cam."

She reached into the back seat and pulled out a knapsack full of gizmos and set up a little portable monitor on the dash, giving us a clear view of the street ahead.

There were only two hours left to the story, and I knew Connie had read it because she was one of the people who recommended it. I briefly told her where we were in the story and hit play. When it ended, there was still no movement on the Moore house. I'd call it and head home except that I was reasonably confident that if Dickerson were going to show here, it would be sometime after dark.

I looked at Connie, and despite our cooling measures, it was still really damned hot in the car. Connie was compensating for that by shoving two frozen gel packs from the cooler under her bra. It was hard to say if the wet spots on her top were from condensation from the ice packs or if it was sweat. Not that anyone was going to notice that when confronted by her nipples. Connie was on high beam, and I don't mean regular high beam. I mean the obnoxiously bright halogen high beam that you see on newer pickup trucks. I was finding it difficult to look her in the eye because damn, it was impressive.

"What?" Connie asked when she noticed the direction of my gaze.

"Connie, your nipples are so hard you could use them to punch a hole through time, " I said. "Maybe you need to take the gel packs out now."

"I know, but they are necessary," Connie said. "I think I've sweat off thirty pounds today. How much longer are we going to be stuck sitting here? We've only got grape popsicles left."

"I'm giving it until ten, and then I'm bailing," I said.

"Here's a question," Connie said, "But did you check the tracker you planted on his car?"

"Didn't need to," I said, "His car's in the driveway. And I don't know if he had a rental or he borrowed a car or what because Bernadette was in absolutely no shape to talk when we got there."

"Do you have any more books?" Connie asked.

"No," I said, "But that last one was excellent. I really like how the guy did the voices."

"You know who I would like to have read me a story?" Connie asked.

"Lula?" I said.

"Not who I was thinking, but I would sell a kidney to hear an unedited rendition of her reading Pride and Prejudice," Connie said.

"Holy crap," I said. "That would be amazing. Hey, you know what? Recording audiobooks might actually be a good career option for Lula."

It made sense. She and Sally Sweet were living together, and they had a recording studio in the basement. She couldn't work as my sidekick because of her pregnancy, and she was bored. Hell, I'd pay her to read the books for me.

"Want to hear something creepy?" Connie asked. "Ed Kemper, the serial killer, he started a project while in prison where inmates recorded audiobooks for the blind, and there are apparently thousands of hours of his voice recorded, reading things like children's books, and cookbooks," Connie said.

"Okay yeah, that's just scary. Tell me Kemper isn't who you want to hear read you a book?"

"Tom Hiddleston."

"Nope," I said, shaking my head, "That's a bad idea; you listen to this stuff in the car. What if he read a sex scene? You'd drive off of the road."

While I did voice this objection out loud, it didn't stop me from searching for a new book by the performer. "Ooooh, he reads Dracula. It says it's a radio play."

"Download it," Connie said, "Do it now."

So I did.

Two hours later the sun had set, the play was over, and I swear that in no way was I freaked out. Sure Connie may have suggested that some of the Rangemen might be vampires, and when she said that, Hector did spring immediately to mind. I rarely saw him during the day. When he went out, he always went out wearing sunglasses and usually a hoodie with the hood pulled up. He preferred little windowless rooms, and he scared the crap out of everybody, including Ranger.

Once that thought began to fester, Connie and I decided to let it take hold, and after about ten minutes we were both starting to nurse a fear of the server room. So we patted ourselves on the back for our stellar decision making and decided to say fuck it to the audiobook thing. Instead, we sat there in silence as twilight gave way to night, and tried not to wet ourselves every single time the wind picked up and jostled the camera on the dash. It was now too dark to get a clear picture on our monitor and naturally, we started to imagine weird shadows on the screen.

"We should probably take the windshield cover off now," I said.

"You do it," Connie said.

"Why me? It's not like we have to get out of the car to do it. You don't have to put it in the trunk. It can go on the back seat."

"And if there's a vampire sitting on the hood of the car, waiting to hypnotize us as soon as we take it down?"

"We'd have seen him on the camera," I said.

"No, we wouldn't. Vampires don't show up on cameras or in mirrors. Everyone knows that."

"Don't be ridiculous; Vampires didn't have reflections because cameras and mirrors all used to use silver in some way, and silver and the undead don't go well together. This camera is digital, and mirrors don't have silver in them anymore."

"No, they don't have reflections because they don't have a soul," Connie argued.

"I would buy that, except Vinnie has a reflection and so does Joyce," I said. Aha! I had her there.

"If it's so ridiculous, why don't you take it down?" Connie challenged.

Well, the answer to that was simple; there might be a vampire sitting on the hood of the car waiting to hypnotize us into letting him in.

 _ **Thump, thump.**_

The noise had come from the roof of the car. Something had landed on it.

"That was just our imagination," I said to Connie.

"Yep," she said, "Absolutely just our imagination."

"Okay," I said. "We have to take this thing down. Dracul…Dickerson is most likely to show up now that it's dark. If we're going to follow him, we can't do it with the cover on the window."

 _ **Thump, thump.**_

The noise had relocated to the hood of the car.

"Okay," I said, "Here's the plan. You close your eyes, and I'll take the thing off of the windshield. If you hear me talking to Dracula, stop me from letting him in."

"I'll turn the child locks on so you can't open the doors," Connie said.

"You know we're assholes right?" I said.

"Absolutely, and we're never speaking of this again."

"Ready?" I asked.

She closed her eyes and nodded. "Yes?" She said.

She sounded as sure as I felt. I took the thing down, and a pair of green eyes on the hood of the car glowed back at me. One or both of us screamed, and the cat on the hood of the car took flight and bolted across the street. "Did you see that thing?" Connie said. "That was no normal cat, it was as big as a fucking mountain lion."

"I thought you were keeping your eyes closed against vampire hypnosis!"

"I was too scared, and I sort of wanted to see a vampire," Connie said. "What if he was hot?"

"We're never speaking of this again," I said.


	7. Chapter 7

_**AN: I'm so glad you enjoyed the last chapter! Here's the next installment. Anything familiar belongs to JE, and any mistakes belong to me.**_

Whenever I decide how long I'm going to be on a stakeout, it's always half an hour longer than I really mean. The reason I do this is pretty simple. See if I say 9:30 then I can talk myself into leaving fifteen minutes to half an hour early, and then I leave at 9:00 and not 9:30. But if I say 10:00 out loud, trying to take off at 9:00 makes me feel like a lazy quitter.

It was 9:27 and I was counting down the seconds to until I could leave when Dickerson showed up in a rental car. We had his credit cards flagged so how he managed to rent it, was a mystery for another day.

Abby came to the door before he had a chance to get up the steps, and they had a hurried conversation, and Connie rooted around in the backpack for something and came up with a parabolic mic. "You couldn't have set that up like hours ago?" I asked.

"I forgot I had it," Connie whispered.

"Why are you whispering? He can't hear us."

She considered that for a minute, gave me the finger, and started recording Dickerson.

"But what about Sadie?" Abby said, "You didn't want to think about her in all of this? If she's implicated, they will go after her next."

"Bernie is in the hospital. I saw the ambulance come for her today and I don't know if it's because of an episode or if it's because they got to her. They've been following her for weeks now, and they made contact with her on the weekend. They are going to kill her."

"What about these friends?" Abby asked. "Can't you go to them?"

"They can't help," he said, "It's too late. If something happens to me while I fix this…"

"I'll take care of Bernie," Abby said, "I promise. Go to Glen's house."

She hugged him and handed him a set of keys, and then he ran to his car, looked around the street, and then drove off. We had to wait until Abby went inside before we started the car. We didn't want to risk her seeing us leave, so Connie went into the file we had on Abby. "Glen is her cousin who lives in Iowa."

"He's not going to Iowa," I said, and started the car. "Do a title search on Glen and see if he has any properties nearby."

"He has a place in Asbury Park," Connie said. I waited until Abby was inside, and then I started the car and headed towards the Garden State Parkway.

We caught up to him twenty minutes later and overtook him. Connie watched him to make sure he was doing what we were expecting him to do. Once we were on NJ-18 South, I got off of the highway, and immediately got back on again, staying well behind Dickerson, not catching up until he was near Exit 10A headed towards Asbury Park on 66.

He turned onto Seaview Avenue and parked on the street in front of a pretty, baby blue Saltbox house that had it not been packed in with a bunch of other houses, would have had a view across the street of Wesley lake. We drove past the house, turned left on Central Avenue, and then left onto Atlantic and parked the car on the corner of Atlantic and Beach. We got out of the car and walked back to Sea View Avenue.

"Did Lester give you any GPS thingies?" I asked.

She nodded and dug around in the black knapsack and handed me a little black plastic box with the trackers, and I jogged up to Dickerson's rental and put the tracking dot on it. I made sure it was working properly and then jogged back to Connie.

Ranger chose that minute to call me.

"Hey," I said, "I'm in Asbury Park."

"I know," he said, "I can see that."

I instinctively looked around and then remembered he was probably looking at me through the screens in his office. It had been a long day in the car. I should have probably quit hours before. "Are you coming out here to get me?"

"Yes, and I'm bringing relief," he said, "If Dickerson leaves, follow him. I see the tracker you set up, but if he ditches the car, I don't want you to lose him."

"Okay," I said and disconnected.

Connie looked at me, "We should put a dot on him."

"And how the hell are we going to do that?"

Connie thought about it for a minute and then her eyes lit up with inspiration. "I've got an idea."

She had me hold her phone for her while she fixed her heat fried hair, and put on some hooker red lipstick.

"Are you going to take the gel packs out from your bra?" I asked.

"Yeah, but not too soon; I want the girls at full attention," she said and plumped them a bit for good measure.

"Gotcha," I said.

Personally, I didn't think they needed to be at full attention; parade rest would have been fine too. Connie finished doing her hair and makeup, and she got up and slung her purse over her shoulder. "Gimme the thing."

I handed her the dot, and she stumbled up to the door and tried to put her house key in the lock. It wouldn't go, obviously, and she jiggled it a bunch of times. Dickerson wrenched the door open.

"You're not Dave. Dave gave me this key and said to come here." Connie's voice was slurred as she teetered on her heels like she was drunk.

"Who are you?" He demanded.

"Tammy," Connie said. "I'm Tammy, and Dave gave me this key to this house."

"Why do you have ice packs under your boobs?" Dickerson asked.

I smacked myself on the forehead.

"It was super hot on the beach," she said. She stumbled and fell into Dickerson, presumably taking the opportunity to put the dot in his pocket and stood upright. "Where's my phone? I'm gonna Uber."

"No way. I don't like Uber; I'm not going to let you get into a car with some stranger; not in your condition. Come inside and let me make you a coffee."

"I'm not going inside a strange man's house," she said.

"We can wait on the porch then, for a proper taxi."

Connie wasn't going to get out of this easily. Shit, I was going to have to do something. I went back along the street, crossed the road and started calling, "Tammy! Where the hell are you?"

It took Connie a beat to remember her name was Tammy, but then she turned and waved enthusiastically, "I'm here Lula," she said.

I rolled my eyes, "Come on, your brother Dave is waiting for you at his house. You went the wrong way, idiot."

"Oopsies!" Connie said, and she stumbled down the porch and across the street to me.

"Lula? Really?" I hissed.

"The first name that popped into my head," Connie said.

She finger waved at Mr. Dickerson, and I helped her down the sidewalk until we were out of his line of sight. Then we crossed back over and scurried back up the street to our stuff, and resumed our surveillance.

I was getting hungry, and tired, and I was hot and cranky and jealous of Connie's frozen ta-tas. I was starting to wish I had Ranger's screens on my phone so I could follow his progress to us, so at least I could count down the minutes until I could get some food.

I was about to text Hector to ask him if he would do that, when Dickerson came running out of the house, and rather than get into his rental, he went to the garage and got into a little blue VW Golf. Good thing Connie got the tracker on him.

We ran back to Connie's car and came up short. I pulled my phone out of my pocket again.

"What the fuck?" Connie said.

"You're riding with me. This is the shit that happens to me. Text Tank; he'll take care of it," I said. She grumbled under her breath as she texted. Someone had put her car up on blocks. It wasn't going anywhere.

"What are you doing?" Connie asked.

"We don't want to miss what's got him in such a hurry," I said, and I ordered an Uber. We waited five minutes for a minivan driven by a woman wearing a pair of plaid flannel shorts, and a loose t-shirt that said 'Sweet Dreams' on the front. She was wearing slippers, and her hair was in a ponytail.

"Where too?"

"Follow this dot," I said and put my phone on her dash. She looked at me like I'd lost my mind.

"What is this?" she asked.

"Cheating husband; we're PI's trying to catch him in the act," I said. It was mostly true.

"Where's your car?"

"Someone stole the wheels," I said.

"I hate when that happens," she said.

I climbed into the front seat and Connie wedged herself between car seats in the back. "Are these Goldfish crackers fresh?" she asked once we started rolling.

"The ones in the little bowl things are, help yourself. I wouldn't trust the ones in the kid seats. If you're feeling brave, there are probably M&M's in the car seat too," our driver said.

"I'll stick to the crackers," Connie said.

"There are juice boxes in the storage compartment under the floor."

"Oooh and wet ones!" Connie said. Connie handed me a wet wipe, a handful of Goldfish and a box of grape-apple juice like product.

"So are those ice packs under your jugs?" our driver asked Connie.

"They are," Connie said.

"Take them out, and I'll put on the AC. If you leave them there, I'm afraid you're going to poke someone's eye out."

"So what's your name?" Connie asked as she fished around in her cleavage.

"Noreen," she said.

"Nice to meet you, Noreen," Connie said.

Here's the thing, this was no high-speed car chase. Dickerson was driving a reasonable speed, and he was clearly headed back to Trenton, so it wasn't exactly super exciting. Noreen was a chatty sort of person, and we learned that she was a mom of four under the age of six, and she took up Uber driving as a way to have adult interaction in the evenings without having to worry about little kids climbing all over her.

She and Connie hit it off, and by the time we were back in Trenton, they'd decided to hook up for drinks the following week. When we got back to Trenton an hour later, Dickerson's car was in the parking lot of a deserted warehouse, and Dickerson himself was inside.

Noreen hung in there for about ten minutes before declaring the warehouse creepy. She gave us some granola bars she found in her purse and deposited us in an abandoned bus shelter after we all agreed that it counted as a building, so Dracula couldn't get in unless we invited him. We waved goodbye, and two minutes later Ranger called.

"I was going to call you and ask you why your tracker was in Trenton, while Connie and Dickerson appeared to be in Asbury Park, and then I got your Uber receipt. You took an Uber?"

"I didn't want to lose Dickerson," I said.

"Is Connie with you?"

"Yes," I said.

"We're half an hour away. Can you hang in there that long, or should I pull someone else and send them to you?"

"I'm good," I said. "We're just standing in a parking lot bus shelter, waiting for Dickerson to come out of a warehouse."

"Watch your back," Ranger said.

I nodded to the phone, remembered he couldn't see me, and said goodbye before turning to Connie, "He's coming to pick us up."

"He's just trying to steal our thunder. We were the ones who put in the hard work."

"I wouldn't exactly call it hard work; we sat in a sauna eating popsicles," I said.

"So are we going in there to scope it out?"

"No," I said, "I have no idea what kind of Factory that is."

"I thought the whole point behind taking the Uber in the first place was because we wanted to find out what he was running off to deal with?"

"Well, it was," I said. "But it's been a long day, and that place looks like something out of a horror movie."

I wasn't joking either. It was big, boxy, with broken windows, a faded sign and it was really dark, except for one corner of the place that had a light shining in a window. I was willing to bet we had to go through the nine circles of Hell to get to that light and I wasn't feeling up to it unless it was absolutely necessary. We hung out for about ten minutes in the stale air of the bus shelter, debating whether or not we should brave the relatively fresh air outside when the building suddenly flooded with light. It would have been okay, except there was an electrical issue and the light had an intermittent flicker. I think I preferred it dark.

"That's it. I'm done," Connie said. "Call another Uber."

"It's just a bad tube in one of the fluorescent light fixtures," I said. "It means the building is old, and you probably shouldn't go in there if you're prone to migraines."

I wasn't allowing myself to be creeped out by this. I already felt like an ass from the Dracula incident; I wasn't going to let myself believe that a faulty light socket was a bad omen.

Then I felt like Ray from Ghostbusters, when he accidentally thought about the Stay Puft marshmallow man, because I thought, 'Bad Omen,' and we heard rapid gunfire. Connie went to bolt away from the building and me, being an idiot, I grabbed her wrist and dragged her towards the entrance.

We got inside, and Connie handed me her gun. It was loaded and everything. She was probably a better shot than I was, so I wasn't sure why she gave me the weapon, but I was grateful because this place was creepier on the inside than it looked from the outside.

We were in a room full of dust covered crates, and spiderwebs, and dark shadows. I walked over to one of the more dilapidated boxes and kicked it, breaking it and praying it didn't contain the Ark of the Covenant. Connie bent down with the flashlight from her phone to check to see what we were looking at.

"Oh Lovely," she said.

"What?"

She pulled a shiny blue cardboard box with glow in the dark, spooky writing, and showed me a realistic, rubber, severed head. A sticker promised a realistic arterial bleed.

"Like this place needed to be creepier," she said.

Uh huh. Connie opened the box and pulled the head out and shoved it in the bag of stuff from Lester. "What are you doing?"

"You never know, it might come in handy," she said. "Ohh look, a severed hand. You take that one."

"No!" I hissed. "You take it; you have the backpack, and I need to hold the gun."

"Won't fit. I think the head's enough, right?"

We kept walking through the rooms, and we went out on to a production floor. We stopped short as the PA system crackled into life, playing a familiar song.

"What is that?" Connie asked, "Is that from _Grease_?"

It sounded like we were listening to _We Go Together,_ but it was wrong. The lyrics were all distorted and muffled, but I suddenly felt like I was eight years old.

"No," I said. "I think it's from a cartoon."

"No that's _Grease_."

We both paused to listen as the song came to an end and started over again.

 _Muppet Babies, We make our dreams come true!_

 _Muppet Babies, we'll do the same for you…_

"I fucking love, the Muppet Babies," Connie said.

"Right now they are creeping me the fuck out," I said.

The power flickered again, and the music slowed.

 _When the world looks kind of weird and you wish that you weren't there…_

Kermit had gone from cute and babyish to child of Satan. I wanted the fuck out of there. I was about ready to skedaddle when we heard a man start to scream. Again, instead of running away, we ran towards the bad sounds. Connie reluctantly, and me like an enthusiastic moron.

We ran up a rickety metal staircase and saw Waldo Dickerson tied down to a ventilated platform with a big sheet of heated plastic stretched a few feet above him, and it was coming down over him.

We sprinted to the machine to try and turn it off, but it needed a key, and it had been broken off in the controls. Dickerson did not look in good shape. He'd been whacked over the head with something, and he'd been stabbed a few times in the gut.

"Help me," he gasped. I started trying to cut Dickerson's restraints with Connie's car keys, while Connie looked for a way to cut power to the machine. There was the loud rapid report of gunfire, and Dickerson jerked and went still. I turned and Connie and I stared in horror as a seven foot, baby Animal muppet, wearing a bonnet and diaper and holding an uzi started running for us.

We took off for the nearest place to hide, and Animal started firing in our direction. We dove behind a machine and put our backs to it. We could see Animal coming towards us in the reflection of a plate glass window above us.

We were trapped, we couldn't get out without breaking cover, and the nearest door was twenty feet away. Animal could only sustain fire for about ten seconds before he would have to re-load and we'd have a couple of seconds at most to do something.

"Give me the bag," I said to Connie.

"What are you going to do? Take his fucking picture?"

"I'm going to distract him and then I'm going to cover you while you run for that door. I'll be two steps behind you."

"Are you sure this is going to work?"

"No," I said. I pulled the head out of the bag and saw a big plastic pin on the bottom like you'd see on a grenade. Pretty sure this wasn't a bomb, but that would be one helluva distraction if it were.

I grabbed the rubber head by the hair and waited until the firing stopped before I pulled the pin and heaved the severed head at Animal. It hit the floor with a disgusting thump-squish, and blood from inside the 'artery' splotched on the floor before the head rolled to a stop at Animal's feet. Animal let out a scream that was muffled by his suit, and Connie sprinted for the door. I started firing towards Animal and made for Connie's doorway.

Animal covered his eyes with one hand, reaching all the way up to the top of his costume, instead of shielding the eye hole in the mask head's mouth, and turned his head away, firing blindly towards us. We hit the deck and slammed the door behind us.

The room appeared to be a janitor's office. There were no windows, but there was a solid steel door and a chair we were able to wedge under the door handle. I fumbled for my phone and called Ranger.

"Yo," I said, "Are you close?"

"In a manner of speaking?" he said, and I heard gunfire on his end of the phone.

"What do you mean in a manner of speaking?"

"I'm on the ground floor; I'm pinned down by Kermit the Frog and Rowlf the Dog, and they are wearing diapers."

"What the actual fuck?"

"Where are you?"

"In an office upstairs, and we're out of severed heads and bullets."

"Give me a few," he said. It was moments like these that I felt like I needed to examine my life choices. He should have at least been a little phased by the fact that we were out of severed heads. Then again Ranger handled moments of crisis in stride. He got off on it. I handled chaos like an exhausted circus performer trying to get through a highwire act by mainlining Redbull.

It felt like forever before Ranger banged on the door, and I moved the chair away, and we walked out.

"What happened to the Muppets?" I asked.

"Gone," Ranger said. "I think I winged Miss Piggy, but they got whatever they wanted, and left."

"There's a sentence you'll never hear again," Connie said.

"What about Dickerson?" I asked.

"Didn't see him," Ranger said. Connie and I ran to the machine he was in and stopped. Dickerson was gone, but there was a perfect, clear plastic, vacuum formed mold of Dickerson body. I was reasonably sure that even if he wasn't dead from the bullet or stab wounds, he was probably dead from being vacuumed.


	8. Chapter 8

**AN: Sorry for the lengthy interval between posts. I've been dealing with a virus that won't leave me alone, and have been spending most of my time binge-watching ER and trying not to feel like death. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading!**

Ranger had someone take Connie home while he and I cleared the building, looking for any traces of Dickerson, beyond his mold and found nothing. When he didn't turn up, I called Morelli.

"I sort of have a body," I said.

"Of course you do," Morelli said, "How much of this story am I going to get? All of it? 70%? 20%? Did you move it because it was inconveniently located, and now you can't find it?"

"You're getting all of the information, and I didn't move the body. Animal from the Muppets did."

"You know what?" He said, "I'm lying here, in bed, not alone and instead of being pissed off that I think you're yanking my chain about this, I am considering the fact that you're probably serious, and looking forward to the day where you call me at four in the morning with something normal, like I dunno, a quadruple homicide. Just tell me one thing, did you do anything illegal to find yourself at this crime scene?"

"Nope," I said. "I Ubered here."

"Well, there's a silver lining I guess."

I told him where we were and hung up the phone. Ranger was on the phone with someone, when I heard sirens coming towards us. As soon as they pulled into the lot Ranger led them to the scene and then came back to me.

"I'm going to the hospital to speak to Bernadette's doctors. She's going to need to be told, but I don't want to do it without them giving me the okay," Ranger said. "Tell Morelli I'll be by to give my statement."

"As soon as they let me, I'm going home to sleep," I said. " Don't wake me up unless you absolutely have to. In fact, take Lunch Box to play with Julie today, so I don't have him pulling my hair when he wants a banana."

"Will do," he said. He kissed me goodbye and went to the Cayenne in the parking lot.

I sat down on one of the steps leading into the warehouse and closed my eyes for just a second when Joe knocked on top of my head.

"Wake up," he said.

"I'm not sleeping," I said.

"So the drool is the result of dental work then?"

I wiped my mouth and then glared up at him. There was no drool. "You're an ass."

"I try," he said, "So you have a mold of a dead guy?"

"I'm 98% sure he's dead," I said. "I mean he was wounded and tied to the thing, and then he was shot, and then vacuumed. He's probably dead."

"Yep," he said, "You're right, he's probably dead. So when did you see this happen?"

I gave him a rundown of our evening, minus Connie's boobs and Dracula and he looked like he was torn between wanting to laugh and utter disbelief. I believe the word 'dumbfounded' was invented for an expression just like his. "Muppet Babies?"

"Muppet Babies," I said. "Animal shot at Connie and me, and then Ranger said something about Kermit and Miss Piggy and maybe Rowlf the dog."

"Where is Ranger now?" Joe asked.

"He went to go check on Dickerson's wife. She's in the hospital and might not be stable enough for bad news."

"I'll need his version of things," Joe said.

"I can't promise he'll say much."

"He never does," Joe said. "I'm going to need copies of everything you have from this case."

I nodded again, and Joe looked over my head and waved to a Detective I didn't recognize. The Detective came towards us, and my jaw dropped. Joe closed my mouth for me, with the back of his hand.

"Stephanie Manoso, meet Detective Buckerson, or Bucky," Joe said. "He comes to us from Boston."

"You're shitting me," I said.

"I'm not," Joe said.

Bucky looked like a pissed off Mark Wahlberg if he were, I dunno, standing ten feet away. It's not like Marky Mark is known for being tall either; I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that he was only 5'8" Bucky was all around smaller. If he were five four, I'd be surprised. It was like he was built perfectly to scale, which of course led to the question, was everything to scale? Why my mind went there, I have no idea, but it was like he was used to this because he glared at me.

"Everyone thinks it," Joe said out of the side of his mouth.

"Pleasure to meet you," Bucky said. He looked like Mark Wahlberg, but he spoke like someone had kicked his larger doppelgänger in the jewels. His voice was weirdly high and sounded incongruous coming out of his mouth. I was expecting something deeper.

"Sorry," I said and shook his hand, "I've been up since yesterday morning, and I'm a little punchy."

"Is it possible you hallucinated the muppets?" Joe asked.

"Me and Connie, sure. We'd been doing the stakeout thing for way too long," I said, "But Ranger saw them too."

The weird distortion that you get when a cassette tape is wearing out came out over the factory speakers, and then the Muppet Babies theme music started again. "Is that Grease?" Joe asked.

"Listen," I said.

"Well that's just fucked up," Joe said. "And totally destroying a large part of my early childhood."

"Pretty much," I said.

"Is it from Grease?" Bucky asked.

"No," Joe said, "Have you never seen Grease?"

"No," he said.

"That's just not right," I said.

"I try to stay away from that sort of shit," Bucky said.

"I hear you," Joe said, He squinted at the mold for a bit, and frowned. "You're sure it was Dickerson you saw? That mold is a lot cleaner than I would expect it to be."

"Yes," I said. "I mean we tried to cut him free before we got shot at."

"By an Uzi, and you didn't even get grazed?"

"Better to be lucky than good?" I said on a yawn that started small but suddenly felt like it was never going to end, to the point that I started panicking a little bit, like I was going to be stuck yawning for the rest of my life, never being allowed to inhale.

Joe briefly stuck his finger in my gaping mouth, effectively ruining the yawn. It was as infuriating as being interrupted just before an orgasm. I mean I was starting to feel light headed, but the yawn had to end soon right? He didn't need to wreck it.

"What the hell," I demanded. "I don't know where that finger has been."

"I was worried you were going to turn blue and pass out," he said. "I'd never be able to explain that to Ranger."

"Why?"

"Cupcake, I wouldn't be able to stop laughing," he said. "Go home."

"I can't go home," I said. "Ranger's gone, and Connie and I had to take an Uber here, and my phone is dead."

Joe looked at Bucky, "I'll be back in half an hour. Tell the techs I want them to see what they are able to produce with the mold after they have processed it."

"I'm on it," Bucky said. "Are you taking the lead on this?"

"You can have the lead, but I want to be kept in the loop."

Bucky nodded and waved us off, and then Joe drove me back to Haywood. He parked in front of the building before I had a chance to doze off. "I'll need you to give Bucky your statement after you've had some sleep. Please for the love of God do not give him a hard time," he said.

"I have to know," I said. "You've presumably seen Bucky in the showers at the gym or in the locker room or whatever… Is everything to scale?"

"I haven't seen him for myself," Joe said, "But rumor has it, he's hung like a bear."

"Why aren't you taking the lead on the case?"

"I've been filling in for the Captain while he's been on leave for the last little while. I'm playing at being the boss."

"Fun," I said. "I thought working a desk made you nutty?"

"Oh it does," he said. "This was a nice change, so thanks for that."

"How much longer are you stuck there?"

"Another week," he said, "Though I gotta say, as crazy-making as it is, I'm not unhappy about the regular hours. I haven't worked them in years, and I forgot what it felt like to be well rested."

"Now you're just bragging," I said. I got out of the car and went towards the building and fobbed my way inside. Julie was sitting at the front desk, with Lunch Box sitting on his perch behind her, supervising her work.

"Look what I taught him!" She said. She turned around and said, "Hey Shrek."

"Get out of my fucking swamp!" Lunch Box yelled in a perfect Shrek impersonation.

"While normally I'd be all over that and think it was cool, I was shot at by muppets today, so I'm going to need a little while to appreciate it," I said.

"Oh wait, before you go. Hector cloned that computer you borrowed, and he removed all passwords. He said Ranger said you were going to want to go through it, and the original is going to have to go to the police. I'm making copies of everything you have from the case. I'll bring them up to you when they are done."

She handed me the laptop, and I took it upstairs. I went to bed and crashed without opening the computer. I slept for seven hours and woke up feeling more human. I made myself some coffee and opened the laptop, and went back to the file that Dickerson wanted us to look at.

Inside the Black Socks folder, there was a file labeled, Bernadette. The Bernadette file listed her medical condition and all of the research he could find on it. There were documents written in German, Russian, and French, with their English translations. There were possible treatment options, and lists of medications.

Then there was the medical chart. Dickerson recorded absolutely everything about his wife. He had a fancy temporal thermometer that didn't require contact with a patient to take a reading, and every morning before she woke up, and every night before she went to sleep, he recorded her temperature. He took pictures of her outfits every day, with entries of what that day's air temperature was when she left the house. There were bills from a private investigator, whose only purpose was to follow Bernadette around all day. He kept note of who she hung out with, where she went, how often she went to the bathroom. All of this was recorded into a spreadsheet, and her medications were adjusted according to what was on each page.

It was like Dickerson was stalking his wife with the best intentions. It wasn't really any different than Ranger putting trackers on me without my knowledge, or having me followed for my own good, but I'm willing to bet she had no idea this was happening, or she would have been pissed. It was working though. Prior to their marriage, she was prone to six or seven episodes a year, and with Dickerson's stalking, she was down to just one in the last two years.

I made a note to call the private investigator to see what happened with her on the weekend so I could find out what put Dickerson in such a panic. Ranger came into the apartment and looked at the computer.

"Hey," I said. "You only have me followed when there's a threat right? You don't have someone stalking me all of the time do you?"

"Only when there's a threat," he said. "And I usually tell you about it, and if I don't, I make sure you can spot your tail. Why?"

I showed him the files, and he looked at the computer for a second, and he closed it. "I need to ask you to drop this," he said.

"What?" I said, startled, "Why?"

"Because this isn't our problem anymore. Whatever Dickerson was involved in, was with some dangerous people and it's a police investigation now."

That didn't make any fucking sense. Ranger has never asked me to back off of something before unless I've been injured or something. If it's really dangerous he gives me protection, and he helps me put a stop to it, but he doesn't tell me to back down. I was about to say something when I realized that Ranger's expression was wrong. It looked like it did the night he came to my place the night after he jumped off of a bridge to save me, and he was shaken. That's when I noticed the smell of smoke on his clothes.

"What happened?" I asked. I sat as he told me of his afternoon, and when he was finished, I gave him a hug.

"I need to be able to focus on this. I need for this to be my priority, and I can't do that if you're in danger," he said.

I nodded, and I turned around and closed the laptop. I put it in the box and I took it out into the corridor and put it on the floor. I sent a text to Minnie telling him to put the box into storage, and I turned around and went back inside.

"Did I tell you about Dracula?" I asked.

"Dracula was at the factory?" he asked.

"Nope," I said and told him about Connie and my freak out in the car.

"Do you know what my favorite part about that story is?" he asked.

"That we thought the child locks would keep a vampire out of the car?"

"No," he said, with a chuckle, "Though that was good. That you were going to take on the vampire. Of course you were."

"It might kill me, but I'll stay out of the Dickerson thing," I said. "Your head needs to be here now."

"Just until I can sort this shit out," he said. "If the police have made no headway after I've got this mess cleared up, then have at it."

"What would you like me to do?"

"I'm working on something for the government that requires a lot of research. Something you're singularly gifted at."

"Do I have the clearance for it?"

"I'm working on it. For now, we can work on a need to know basis," Ranger said. I nodded, and I meant it. I would back off. He wasn't asking me to leave it because he thought I was in over my head, he was asking me to back off because he wanted to have my back and right he was needed somewhere else.

I was able to keep my promise until the middle of August, but when I broke it, it totally wasn't my fault.

 _AN: I was vague about what happens with Ranger at the end of this chapter because to give any more detail would have been a major spoiler for something that's still a ways off in the Molly Von G story._


	9. Chapter 9

**AN: Next weekend is a long weekend in Canada, and I'm not sure if I'm going to have time to post. So here's a nice long chapter to maybe tide you over just in case ;). Thank you for reading! Anything familiar belongs to J.E.**

For the next few weeks, there was a routine to our days. I would get up at around eight, have breakfast, go downstairs to Ranger's office, where I'd find him sitting at his desk, reading documents written in foreign languages, and their corresponding translations. JigSaw would come in, and he'd take them, and any of Ranger's notes about them, in exchange for what looked like a book of crossword puzzles, but in reality was a notebook. Ranger would read it, and give me a list of things to research, and then I'd spend my days doing the research. It was really random stuff. Once it was a four-hundred-year-old Russian poet, another time it was an architect from Madrid in the 60's.

"Why am I doing this?" I asked. When he asked me to start researching 18th-century millinery. "Aside from the newfound ability to kill it at trivia nights at the bar, what is the point of this?"

"We're helping Interpol track a serial killer," Ranger said.

"By knowing obscure Russian Poets?"

"Yep," Ranger said.

"How?"

Ranger was sitting on his sofa, next to the door, reading through one of JigSaw's notebooks, and I could have sworn his shoulders dropped minutely. He took a second to think about his response, and it looked like he was mentally gearing himself up for the conversation.

"He has exceptionally controlled crime scenes where he stages the bodies, and he's been leaving letters. Some of the letters are in code, some of them are poems or riddles. We've been looking for a connection between the victims and we think we've found one, thanks to your research."

"What's the connection?"

"A company called MTW Inc."

"No," I said. "You're joking."

"No," he said. My eyes grew wide, and I was doing some deep breathing of my own.

"I know who the killer is," I said, and bit the inside of my cheek.

"Babe, no," Ranger said.

"I do! Seriously! It's a guy named Edward Nigma."

"No."

"MTW, Martha and Thomas Wayne? Nigma used to work for them. He operates under an alias now. It's the Riddler. You have to catch him, Batman!"

"Are you finished?"

"No! Because I just realized that Batman is using research I've gathered for him to track the Riddler, which must mean that I'm the Oracle. I've always suspected I had it in me."

"You're not paralyzed," he said. "And I'd prefer it if you stayed that way."

"Have you got a suspect list? You really should look for…"

"MTW Stands for Merryel, Throstick, and Watts," Mr. No Fun said. "It's not a charitable organization like the Martha and Thomas Wayne Foundation. It's a company that manufactures cheap textiles."

"Why the hell was that classified information?"

"It wasn't," Ranger said. "I was just happy to let you believe it was."

"Why?"

"I was trying to avoid this conversation."

"Well it was kind of inevitable wasn't it?" I teased.

"Yeah," he said. "I was considering opening a book on it. I'd have made a killing."

Ranger put his feet up on the coffee table and grinned. "I was expecting you to take it further."

"Well you sprung it on me; I need time to process so I can make the appropriate ridiculous jokes."

"It's a good thing I didn't let you make the connection on your own," he said. "You could have stewed on it for days."

There was a knock on the door, and Ranger reached over to unlock it and admit whoever it was. It turned out to be Lester. I was surprised to see him, he'd been taking a lot of personal time lately.

"What?" Ranger asked.

"Nothing new," Lester said. "I'm going to New York again. I might have a lead."

"Okay," Ranger said. "What did you need?"

"Nothing, Minnie said that you wanted me to go over this," Lester said, he held up a file folder and used his free hand to scratch the back of his head.

"And?" Ranger asked.

"I mean he's going to have some problems. I checked it out with Hector, and the computer is completely off network, so we're going to have to go in to do things manually. But based on this woman's profile her password is not going to be her birthday or a pet's name. Hector and I are thinking we'll go in and plant a keystroke log onto the computer, let it sit for a couple of days and then go back and use that to get around her passwords."

"And how long is that going to take?"

"Well planting the log will take a few minutes, and it'll be easy to do, but depending on how much she uses the computer we're going to need a lot of time to sift through the entries to find possible passwords. We're going to go in after hours, and we're looking into the security right now. It doesn't look like it's going to be light B&E either. They just did a complete security overhaul after some recent thefts."

"There isn't an easier way?" Ranger asked.

"I've been through everything Minnie gave me, and I don't think there is."

"Don't act without showing me the final plan," Ranger said.

"Got it, boss," Lester said.

"When do you go back to New York?"

"As soon as I'm done with Minnie."

"Keep me updated," Ranger said. Lester nodded and left.

"What's Minnie up to?" I asked.

"I gave him a job to do, and somehow the men got hold of the problem, and they are all really over-thinking it."

"Is it urgent?"

"Not in the slightest," Ranger said. "It's a good distraction, and I'm letting them roll with it for a while."

"Do you have the solution already?"

"I do," Ranger said.

"How long did it take you?"

"Less than a minute," he said.

"Are you going to tell me what it is?" I asked.

"No," he said, "Because when they come back with whatever heist they've got planned, I'm going to give you the same problem, and you're going to make them all feel like idiots."

"I like when I get to do that," I said, "Are you sure it's in my skillset?"

"Yes," he said.

An email notification showed up in the top corner of my screen, and it was frankly surprising. It was from my mother. I set mom up with an email a long time ago so she could get her bills emailed to her, but never, ever had she sent me an email. The subject line read URGENT

I clicked it open.

Dear Stephanie,

I have been trying to reach you all morning, and you have either been ignoring my calls, or you are away from your phone. I have decided not to take it personally, because I understand that you are busy, but there is a situation here at the house, in the form of a wedding gift. It is blocking the driveway, and your father isn't able to take his cab out. It's entirely possible that he will execute your grandmother with a tube sock if you don't do something about it.

Hope you are well.

Love,

Your mother, Helen Plum

"Umm Ranger," I said, "I think we need the truck."

"You're afraid to drive your new car," he said.

"No," I said. And yes absolutely I was. It was a Boxter with the same paint job as my last Porsche, and it was even prettier than the 9-11 and a convertible. "Read this email."

He read it over my shoulder, "I take it the 'we' in your suggestion about the truck, wasn't a royal we?"

"That would be correct."

"Let's go," Ranger said.

Ten minutes later we were in front of my mother's house, and I was starting to wonder if 'What the Fuck?' Could be classified as an emotion, because I really couldn't pin down a word that accurately described how I felt. I was a little afraid, a little curious, a little resigned, a lot confused, pissed off, and incredulous.

There were six dogs of varying pedigree straining against leashes held by their bewildered owners, as a crowd had gathered to look at the six-foot tall wedding gift, parked in the middle of my mother's driveway. It wasn't a big box or anything. It looked like someone had taken several rolls of cheap silver and white wedding paper and wrapped it around whatever it was under the paper. And they hadn't done a particularly good job. There were tears in the gift wrap near the bottom where a couple of dogs had gotten at it, and in places, the paper appeared to be grease stained.

"We're not keeping it," Ranger said.

"You don't think it's a body, do you?" I asked.

"Standing up?" He said. "Unless he was stuffed, I don't think it's likely."

"The dogs are really interested in it," I said.

"Would you like me to get a cadaver dog?"

"That depends. If the guy has been stuffed will the cadaver dog actually be able to figure it out?"

"Depends on the dog, but it might be easier to unwrap it."

"In front of the crowd?"

"I could shoot someone," Ranger said, "That would clear them out pretty quick."

"Okay Lula," I said, "No shooting."

Ranger parked the car a bit up the street, and we walked back to my mom's place. Ranger handed me a hair tie and a pair of rubber gloves. He had garbage bags from the back of the truck, and together we got to work. It turned out that on closer inspection the silver and white paper wasn't wedding paper, but very inexpensive Christmas paper. Instead of wedding bells, I was looking at white wreaths, silver bells, and holly. It was the sort of mistake I would make while shopping for gift wrap.

The smell coming from under the paper was unmistakable. It was not dead body either, peanut butter, which was why the dogs were going absolutely bananas. When we finished unwrapping, we found ourselves staring at David, somehow sculpted out of peanut butter.

"You don't think Fat Stan sent this, do you?" I asked. Stanley Mallory was hands down the scariest dude I've ever met. He was a villain for hire, that made James Moriarty look mild mannered and well adjusted. Fat Stan had a thing for Ranger and me, and according to Ranger, he once killed a guy, by encasing him in clay, keeping him alive on feeding tubes and oxygen, while he was sculpted into a perfect replica of David. When Fat Stan finished, he cut off the food and oxygen and gave the statue to the guy's wife. She didn't find her husband until the sculpture got broken a long time later.

"Stan doesn't like to repeat himself, and he'd be offended at the comparison."

The statue wasn't great. It sort of looked like the sort of thing a preschooler would make. My mother screamed from her kitchen and came running out of the house holding an apron that she quickly fastened around David's waist. Did I mention David was sporting an impressive boner? It was sort of okay when it was just a mass of peanut butter, and you could only sort of make out what it was, but now that he had a tent to pitch, it the statue was pornographic.

"Maybe we should give him a textbook or something to hold in front of it," I said to Ranger.

"Or I can just borrow a refrigerator truck and take David away in that. I'm surprised it's lasted this long in the heat without melting."

Thump.

David's wood fell off and rolled down the driveway into the waiting mouth of a very excited Jack Russel Terrier. A big yellow lab attached to a jogging leash that was around the waist of a woman who weighed approximately ten pounds decided that he wanted it, and took off after the Jack Russel, dragging his helpless owner across the driveway.

And with that, the dogs collectively lost their minds. It was chaos for about thirty seconds while Ranger jogged to the side of the house and uncoiled a hose, to take to the dogs, but it was a thirty seconds that would live in infamy.

The woman who was dragged found herself under a pile of dogs all trying to go for the peanut butter wiener while a couple of border collies said fuck it and decided to go for the rest of David. A couple of other dogs were apparently turned on by the nature of their chew toy and decided it would be a great time to make love, on the poor woman curled up in the fetal position, protecting her head. And me? I'm not stupid. I made a beeline for the truck and hid there until all hell stopped breaking loose. I'd already been under a pile of dogs, and I still had nightmares about it.

When Ranger came back with the hose, I waited until the dogs had scattered before I got out of the car to survey the damage. Somehow David's apron had been turned around, and he was wearing it like a frilly holster on his hip. I untied it, and draped it over the nut free magenta dong and picked it up.

Then I went to the woman, who was still curled up in the fetal position, protecting her head.

"You can get up now," I said. I leaned down to help her up, and she waved me off.

"I don't think you want to touch me," she said.

"I'm wearing gloves," I said.

"Right," she said. I took her hand and hauled her to her feet. Her dog was the only dog who hadn't bolted, because he was still attached to her, and he was currently sporting an expression that pretty much said he knew he'd fucked up big time.

"I don't want to know what's in my hair, or on my clothes. Do you think the man with the hose could just…" the woman looked at Ranger and I stepped back while he hosed her down. When he shut off the hose, mom materialized beside the woman with a towel.

"You should probably go to the hospital," Ranger said. "And you should take your dog to the vet. We don't know what was in that peanut butter. Have them bill me."

One of mom's neighbors offered to take her, and she left.

After that, the crowd dispersed, and we were left alone with my mother, in the driveway, watching David slowly ooze onto the pavement.

"How the hell do you even sculpt things with peanut butter?" I asked.

"Val's girls do it all the time," Mom said. "Do you think that woman will bring the towel back?"

"No," I said, "I think we'll be lucky if she doesn't sue. Now how do you sculpt with peanut butter? Do you freeze it and go at it with a chisel a la Michelangelo?"

"No, you make play dough out of it."

What I asked next was, "Why are you making peanut butter playdough?" What I really wanted to know was why the fuck I'd never been given peanut butter play dough as a child. I mean was it like regular play dough that you couldn't eat, only play with? And if so, isn't that just a colossal waste of peanut butter? And if not, and you could eat it, of all of the things to deprive me of as a child, I felt truly offended that I didn't rate peanut butter play dough.

"The baby kept eating the regular playdough, and we were worried about her salt intake, so your grandmother was looking for alternative recipes online, and found one for peanut butter play dough. It's meant to be eaten as you play with it."

"How much salt is in regular play dough?"

"About a cup per batch if you're making the homemade stuff," mom said.

"Wow," I said. "That's a lot."

Mom nodded.

"What's in the peanut butter dough, Mrs. Plum?" Ranger asked.

"Helen, please," mom said. "And I think it's honey, peanut butter, and powdered sugar. I have the recipe inside; would you like it?"

"Thank you," Ranger said.

Mom got her surface and brought it outside and showed the recipe to Ranger. There were three cups of powdered sugar, one cup of peanut butter and a quarter cup of honey. Okay so the baby's salt intake was less, but if she ate this by the pound, she was going to get diabetes.

I looked up, and one of David's nipples dropped off, and I walked over to pick it up. It had been made by half an olive with the pimento removed. I looked at mom. "Does this feel like the stuff grandma makes?"

Mom came over to the statue and peeled a bit of the dough off of David's butt. "No," she said, "This has more sugar in it, to make it firmer."

I looked at the section she'd peeled off and saw a mannequin's bum underneath it. "Well, I guess we know what Leitrim was using my peanut butter for," I said. "But like, why?"

Ranger shrugged and walked over as the second nipple hit the ground after sliding off of David's chest. This one was a Swedish Berry.

He put both the olive and the berry into evidence bags. And gave me a large one to put the schlong into. Tank pulled up a few minutes later with a Freezer truck and big rolls of plastic wrap. Tank hesitated slightly when he saw the statue, and then between he and Ranger they wrapped up David and put him on the truck.

"Have you had lunch?" Mom asked.

"Not yet," I said brightly.

"I'm making soup," she said. Ranger declined and left with Tank to dispose of David. It wasn't until I got to the kitchen table, that I realized I was still holding David's piece. I went to put it down, but mom stopped me, and got a Disney Princess paper plate from the cupboard, and put it down on the center of the table. I stood the thing up, on it, and she covered it with a tea towel, and then a doily. Then she arranged flowers in bud vases around it.

Satisfied, she served me some soup, and we both pretended that it didn't look like her table was super excited about lunch.

"Oh I meant to thank Carlos for intervening last week, and I completely forgot," mom said.

"Intervening?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, "I wanted to go pay Bernadette a visit in the hospital now that she's awake again, but they weren't letting me in. I wasn't on the authorized guest list. Carlos got me through. I feel so badly for her. Waldo is still missing, and nobody knows where he is, and the police are drawing a complete blank as to what could possibly have motivated this."

"Really?" I said.

"Yes," she said, "They said the case is too cold now."

"Did they go out to Steveston or Asbury Park?" I asked.

"I don't know," mom said. "At least thanks to you, she knows he wasn't having an affair."

"There's that," I said.

"Of course the police aren't allowed to question her; she's not healthy enough for it yet. Any mention of Waldo and all of her machines start making noises. You don't know anything about where he is hiding do you?"

"Mom," I said, "I'm fairly certain Mr. Dickerson isn't going to be found alive."

"Oh dear," mom said. "So sad. He was such a nice boy too. He babysat you guys when you were little."

"Really? I don't remember that."

"You wouldn't," she said, "You were just a baby, but you loved him, and he played so well with both of you. That man just understood children you know?"

I heard the dryer buzz in the basement, and mom excused herself to go get the laundry. Dad immediately snuck into the kitchen behind her and went to the cupboard above the fridge. My father's behavior was odd for oh so many reasons. The first being that my father doesn't cook unless absolutely forced to, and second, that was the cupboard where cooking implements went to die. It was where mom had put all of the wedding gifts she couldn't throw out, for fear of being rude, but had never used. Dad grabbed a fondue pot, from this cupboard and produced from within it, a bag of instant espresso grounds.

He motioned for me to watch the door, and then grabbed a mug from the drain rack by the sink. Looking furtively over his shoulder, he dumped a bunch of the grounds into the cup, and then quickly lobbed the bag back into the fondue pot and tossed everything back above the fridge.

He closed the cupboard door, and as my mother came into the kitchen, he innocently poured a cup of coffee from the coffee maker, over the instant coffee in the mug.

He very pointedly measured a single teaspoon of sugar into his cup, a drip of milk to lighten it, and stirred it. He took a sip of it and grimaced. I was trying my damnedest to keep the look of utter horror off of my face as I watched this bit of self-inflicted abuse.

"Oh stop that," mom said. "The doctor told you that you had to cut back on your caffeine intake. You get one regular pot a day, everything after that is decaf. I can't even tell the difference, and you wouldn't be able to either if I hadn't told you it was decaf."

Dad was in the doghouse. She must be pissed at him for not telling him that Ranger and I were going to get married for real. Her retribution towards me had been the reception. Dad was paying for it in terrible coffee.

Mom got the ironing board out of the closet and unfolded it, and went to get her spray starch and realized it was empty. "Oh shoot. I'll be back," she said, "I have another bottle downstairs."

Mom left, and I looked at dad, "Just how bad does that taste?"

"You really don't want to know."

Once mom was gone he poured about a quarter of a cup of sugar into his coffee-like substance. He took a sip, grimaced and added cream to the mix. "Normally I just wait until she goes to the store and I dump the decaff grounds out into the garden and replace them with regular, but she just opened this can and hasn't left the house today thanks to your present."

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"What were you talking about earlier?"

"Mr. Dickerson," I said.

"Shame about him," dad said. "Your mother said you were investigating him? What for?"

"His wife thought he was having an affair."

"Not him," dad said. "His dad was like Rocco Morelli. Slept with anything in a skirt, and Dickerson used to come over here to get away from the fighting. He told me when he was a kid that he wasn't going to get married until he found a woman like I had in your mother, and wouldn't be tempted to cheat. He screwed around a lot before he got married, but once that ring was on his finger, he never looked at another woman."

"I figured out the affair wasn't happening," I said. "He came here a lot?"

"All the time. Started just after Val was born, I think. He started helping out with yard work since your mom was so busy with the baby and couldn't tend to her gardens. I taught him to throw a baseball because his father was useless. I Signed him up for little league and used to take him to all of his games. He played centerfield and had an arm like a canon and the aim of a sniper. His On Base Percentage, his batting average, and slugging average were all insane. He ended up getting a full-ride baseball scholarship."

"Why didn't he continue with baseball?" I asked.

"Got into a bad car accident in his senior year of college. He ended up having his shoulder and elbow replaced. It ruined his career."

"So he decided to become a teacher?"

"Yeah," Dad said. "I mean he was taking applied math at school, so it wasn't really a stretch. He took money from the insurance payout, and went to teacher's college."

"Sorry," I said, "Did you say insurance payout?"

"I did," dad said.

That was three times now that I'd heard about Dickerson receiving a hefty insurance payout. Maybe he was involved in some kind of scam with them? Our searches didn't pick it up, but if it were 26 years ago, the records might not even be online. The phone rang in the kitchen and mom came hurrying in to answer it. "Hello dear," mom said. "Is she any better yet?"

Mom carried the portable out of the kitchen and into the living room. "What's up with that?" I asked my dad.

"Angie has been watching a lot of forensics documentaries for a project at school, and now she's convinced the fiberglass skeleton in her science classroom is real."

Uh-oh.

Dad squinted at the table as if just noticing that the flowers weren't part of the usual arrangement. "Does the table have a hard-on?" dad asked.

"Yep," I said.

"Why?"

"Wedding present," I said.

"From your grandmother?"

That was an excellent question. It was probably grandma's recipe that made the playdough, and that would be something she might think of. Then again she's seen Ranger naked, she knows I don't really need a toy like the present under the tea towel.

"Where is grandma? Mom said you were going to kill her."

"She left. Don't care with who, or where the fuck she went."

I left mom and dad's and drove the few blocks to Val's house, and knocked on the door, and braced myself for chaos. Usually, when you walked into Val's place you were faced with the sound of screaming children, one of the kids always had a runny nose, and the middle child thought she was a horse, so there was a lot of thundering hoof beets upstairs.

Val came to the door, and surprisingly there was quiet. "Did I come at a good time?" I asked.

"Yep," Val said. "Albert has the little one at the park, Mary-Alice is playing some online game with grandma, and Angie is in her room, refusing to talk to anyone."

"What's up with her? That's why I'm here."

"Well remember how Mr. Dickerson bought that fake skeletons that basically got vandalized every year?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well she's convinced it's real," Val said. "It's all her history teacher's fault."

"How?" I asked.

"Well, she's decided that for Halloween everyone gets to research a famous ghost story. They got to choose ghosts out of a hat, and their job is to research them and find out about the real people and circumstances behind the story."

"Okay," I said, "That's a really cool assignment. I'd be all over that."

"And Angie is. She's decided she's going to solve an unsolved murder, and she's been taking a lot of forensic's books out of the library. So yesterday in science class, her teacher pulled the skeleton out of the closet, and Angie went to look at it, and she said she's convinced it's not fiberglass. But it's the same skeleton that's been there since we were kids. It's fiberglass which I told her, and now she's not speaking to me."

"Can I talk to her?" I asked.

"You can talk at her if you want," Val said. Val's house was almost identical in construction to my mom's or Joe's house. She had three bedrooms upstairs, making it a little bigger than Joe's two bedroom, but not by much. The kitchen was at the back, overlooking the garden, there was a family room, a dining room, and the basement was partially finished with the laundry room and rumpus room. The older girl's shared one bedroom, and the baby had the other.

This would never, ever have worked for Valerie and I. Val, was the perfect daughter, whose room was always immaculate, her posters were framed, and never taped on the walls, and her dust ruffle and comforter were always perfect. I was less concerned with perfection, didn't have the patience for framing posters, and the only reason my room was tidy was that my mother would have killed me if it wasn't.

Angie and Mary-Alice were next-generation Val and me, and there were a lot of fights because of the shared room situation. I made for the stairs, and Val stopped me. "We moved Angie to the basement. She's in middle school now, and she needs some privacy."

"That's new," I said.

"She's wearing bras now, and Mary Alice keeps stealing them to pretend they are saddles," Val said. "It was getting to be a problem."

I opened the door to the basement and went down into a pretty cool bedroom. Yes, it was girly, but it was girly scientist. She had an American Girl Doll corner with a lab table set up for her doll, who was wearing a NASA t-shirt. Angie had set up a lab table for herself, with a pink microscope, various plants under pretend grow lights, and she had a shelf of books dedicated to botany, chemistry, and physics.

Currently, the lab table housed books on anatomy and the human skeleton. Angie was on the bed reading a copy of The American Journal of Forensic Science.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," she said, not looking up. She was wearing a pair of faded jean shorts, and a sleeveless turquoise blouse buttoned all of the way up. Her hair was in a perfect ponytail, and she'd managed to subdue the curls she'd inherited from our side of the family, so her ponytail looked like it was in one fat, smooth curl.

"You found a body?"

"Yes," she said. "In science class. The skeleton is real, and he didn't die of natural causes, but nobody will believe me."

"How do you know?" I asked.

She got up and walked over to her desk, and powered up her laptop. It looked relatively new and really fucking cool. It was black, and when she powered it up, an alien face glowed turquoise on it.

"Where did you get that?" I asked.

"Sometimes dad remembers that he has other kids, and feels guilty, so he sends us stuff. MA and I got cool laptops last month, and he's trying to convince us to go see him in California."

"Are you going to go?"

"No," she said. "Mom can't afford that, and we have school."

While she was talking, she was clicking through files. She stopped on a picture of a skull. "Look at all of those fractures that have been glued together, and the shape? According to my book, a hockey stick is responsible for the wound. And if you look on the inside of the skull here, there's staining from blood. And look at this," she said, and clicked to another picture, "This is the right shoulder, and if you look at it, it's whiter than the other bones around it. It's fiberglass, and it's old fiberglass, and it's too small for the frame of the skeleton. Same with his elbow. And there's this. Mr. Dickerson calls the skeleton Wilbur, but he told me last year that someone broke Wilbur's pelvis so he ordered a replacement one, and they sent him a female pelvis. He didn't think anyone in the class would notice though. And look…"

She opened up her web browser and clicked on a link for the Science Fair, and she zoomed in on the skeleton, and then she pulled up a picture of Wilbur that she'd taken on her phone. She zoomed in on the pelvic region on both of them. They did look different. "Huh," I said. "And you told your teacher this?"

"Yes," Angie said. "And she told me my imagination was running away with me. If Mr. Dickerson were here, he'd believe me."

She looked at her clock on her computer and rolled her eyes. "What?" I asked.

"There's a Welcome Back dance at school and mom is making me go."

"You don't want to?"

"I do, but she's all excited because she thinks I have a date to the dance when I don't. There are a bunch of us going, and Stewart Kingston is getting his dad to drive us over to my friend Karina's before we all go to the dance in her mom's van. Mom's all excited because Stewart isn't picking anyone else up, but it's because he lives like four doors down. We're just friends; he's going to the dance with Karina, and her neighbor is the boy who is taking me to the dance."

"Have you told your mom this?"

"No because she'd get all weird," Angie said. "If I deny having a boyfriend, and everything she'll keep her space thinking I want privacy, but if I tell her she'll be all obsessive, and forget that it's not 1955. She'll start telling me how to dress to make him happy and whatever."

"Do I get to know?"

"He's one of the Molnar boys," Angie said, "And that's all I'm telling you, and if you tell Aunt Mary-Lou I'm never, ever talking to you again."

I mimed locking my lips with a key, but I totally crossed my fingers. I was absolutely telling my best friend that my niece had a crush on one of her kids. "Can you email me everything you have about the skeleton?" I asked.

"Even my forensic report?"

"Yes," I said. "What's the deal with this anyway? Your mom said something about a project?"

"Oh yeah, we all have to research a Trenton Ghost Story, and mine is about this woman who was murdered outside of TPD on April 15th, 1912. It didn't get much attention because everyone was so focused on the Titanic sinking that nobody really cared."

"That's pretty gruesome," I said.

"And she was bludgeoned to death, and a lot of people say it looks like it was done with a billy club more similar in design to an espantoon, than the usual truncheon. They figure that since the people who carried these were usually officers, and they were for ceremonial occasions, and the police force was pretty corrupt at the time, it was probable that another reason they didn't look too hard into the woman's murder was because it was someone high up the food chain that did it, and it was being covered up. But I don't think that's true."

"Why?" I said.

"Because if you look at the size of the wound on her skull, it's too big to come from one of those espatoons. It looks more like a baseball bat did it."

"You've seen the skull?" I said.

She nodded enthusiastically, "Someone robbed her grave ten years after her death, and her body was found in the fifties after a cemetery flooded, and she'd been put in the same coffin as the police officer who supposedly killed her."

"Huh," I said. "So you've been studying the head wound, and that's how you knew the skull was a murder victim."

She nodded and got a glossy book from her bookshelf. It was as big as an atlas, and the cover read Famous Skulls.

She turned to a marked page and showed me. There was a picture of the top half of the skull, with measurements, and photographs of the staining inside the skull. I had to admit, it did look like the staining on the inside of the head in Dickerson's old classroom.

"Okay," I said, "Why don't you let me and Ranger look into the skull in the closet, and if you want, I can call Joe and maybe he can get you access to the police report on your victim. What's her name?"

"Stephanie Prune. My friend Stacy and I traded when we saw who she got."

"You're joking," I said.

She shook her head. "See?"

She showed me the caption underneath the picture of the Skull. "Okay, that's creepy. Solve this for me, would you?"

"Will do," she said. "I guess I have to get ready now."

I left her to start getting ready for her school dance and went upstairs to see my sister. "Who's her science teacher?"

"Betty MacCrae," Val said.

"Can you let her know that I'm on my way over to see her?" I asked.

"You think it's a real skeleton?" Val said.

"It doesn't hurt to look," I said. "If it's a real skeleton, but it's a donated one, there will be numbers on the bone to identify it. I'll check it against the registry and give Angie some peace of mind."

"You have time for this?" Val asked.

"Yep," I said.

Twenty minutes later I parked in front of Betty MacCrae's house. Betty was to Val, what Mary-Lou was to me. They were really close in school, and when Val moved back to Trenton from California and got her shit back together, she and Betty picked up where they left off.

She was waiting for me in the yard when I got there, and I suddenly felt like I was in the early 90's.

Betty was about five two, a hundred pounds, and she had shoulder length dark hair that she'd crimped, and the sky-high bangs that took five cans of aquanaut to achieve. She was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and rolled acid wash jean shorts. I swear she looked EXACTLY the same as she did the last time I saw her.

"Don't be alarmed," she said. "I'm not that resistant to change. I'm going to chaperone a retro dance this afternoon."

"I'm not exactly the sort of person who can be a critic," I said. "The other day I wore Doc Martens and flannel."

"Yeah but you're in style right now," she said, "Can you believe my hair? I was pretty proud of myself for remembering how to do it. But the truth is, once I started muscle memory took over."

She'd had the same hair for four years. I could buy that.

"I take it Val filled you in on Angie?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "To be honest, I don't use the damn skeleton, so I can't really tell you if its the same one as the one last year, or not."

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to let me in to take a look at it?"

"I can't today, but I can give you my spare keys," she said. "Come inside while I dig them out."

She lived in a Duplex very much like my sister's, but it was devoid of all things kid. She'd replaced the carpet with blonde engineered hardwood, and she had a pretty, French country kitchen. It didn't really fit with the exterior of the house, but it was nice. I sat at the table, while she rooted through a junk drawer.

"I could kill Nora," she said, "She's Angie's history teacher and the one who's come up with these assignments. I told her not to give Angie a murder. I told her that she'd go way overboard, and she'd start having nightmares. She politely told me to stop telling her how to do her job. Now here we are, and Angie is obsessed with forensics and asking all kinds of questions that I have no idea how to answer, and she's dreaming about unsolved murders."

"Why don't you use the skeleton?"

"Because Wally said that it had lost so many bones over the years that he was really best only for fun. Every time Doctor Who Regenerated he'd pull the skeleton out and dress him up like the old Doctor Who as an homage."

Her opinion meant nothing and her judgment couldn't be trusted. It's just The Doctor. The man's name wasn't Doctor Who. It was a question dammit. Just because there was a production error during The War Machines when two characters called him Doctor Who like it was his name, doesn't mean that's really what his name is. His name is a secret, and it's unpronounceable and only really understood by children.

She found her keys and handed them to me. "Thanks," I said.

"It's room 204," she said.

"Thanks," I repeated.

"And the key to the closet is this one, and the closet is blue."

I looked at the key to a Yale lock and stared back at her. If she watched Doctor Who, she'd know why that was funny. I thanked her, tossed the keys into my messenger bag, and fished out my cell phone to call Ranger.

"Yo," Ranger said.

"So want to come with me to look at the dead body my niece found?"

"Where?"

"Waldo Dickerson's old classroom," I said.

"Meet you at the middle school in ten," he said.

"Who was that?" Betty asked.

"Ranger," I said.

"Who's that?"

"My husband," I said, "Val hasn't mentioned him?"

"Val said you married some scary gang banger type dude, who she was pretty sure kills people."

"He's not in a gang anymore, and I'm pretty sure he only kills bad guys."

"Uhh, only pretty sure?"

"Nobody's perfect," I said. "Want a lift to the school?"

"Sure," she said. She found her handbag, and went out the Cayenne and got in.

When I parked in front of the school a few minutes later, I could already hear music thumping from inside. I felt old watching the kids pay for the tickets as they went inside. When I was in middle school, I pretty much wore jeans and sweatshirts more like what Betty was wearing. These kids were dressed up like they were going clubbing in the 90's. Babydoll dresses that looked more like lingerie than dresses, tiny shorts, bikini tops, crop tops that barely covered the boobs. Really short metallic skirts. It was a version of the 90's but not one I was well acquainted with.

Betty got out of the car with me, and Ranger pulled up behind me in the 918. He parked, and a dude named Leaf got out of the passenger side and came over to relieve me of the keys to the Cayenne. Betty stared at Ranger as he came over to me, and gave me a brief kiss, hello. "What's with the Batmobile?" I asked.

"Felt like it," he said. Ranger loved this car. This car was worth a fortune, and there wasn't exactly a lot of them floating around Trenton. People knew it was his car now, and while there had been the odd case of guys posing by the car while their friends took pictures of them, most people steered clear of it out of respect for Ranger.

"Betty MacCrae, this is Ranger," I said.

Ranger shook hands with her, but I'm pretty sure she'd forgotten how to blink.

"I don't want to go in through the front door," Ranger said. "Is there another way in?"

"Well it'll be locked," Betty said. "And I don't have a key."

"Not a problem," Ranger said.

"You're not going to break any windows are you?" She asked.

"No," Ranger said.

"Okay then," she said. She walked around to the back of the school, and Ranger looked up at the security camera. Betty followed his look, and waved him off, "It's not real. I think some of the students made them in Art class a few years back."

"Where are the real ones?" Ranger asked.

"Front office," she said.

Ranger bumped the lock and let us into the school. "I'm going to want a word with your principal," Ranger said, once we were inside.

"Okay," she said. "She'll be here in like an hour."

"That's fine," Ranger said.

Betty left us to go to the gym to chaperone the dance, and I showed Ranger the way to the Science Classroom. When we walked into the classroom, I felt like I was in Middle School again. Everything was pretty much exactly the same as it was before, and probably the only thing that had been painted since I was there, was the closet containing the skeleton we were there to look for. I went to one of the lab stations in the classroom and opened the cabinet door, and looked inside. There were twenty years of graffiti on it, but there it was, on the inside of the cabinet, "Joseph Morelli is a dick."

I showed Ranger, and he grinned. "What did he do to deserve that?"

"Mary-Lou was going to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and he went with someone else."

"Had she asked him?"

"No," she said, "But what does that matter?"

"Where is this body?" He asked. I handed him the key to the cupboard and pointed to the dark blue closet, "Is it bigger on the inside?"

"I love you," I said. Ranger pretends he's not paying attention to the television when I watch it, but he almost always is. "It's the anatomy skeleton. Angie thinks it's real, and she has a really compelling argument. I told her we'd look at it."

"What does Betty think?"

"She thinks it's the same skeleton that's always been there," I said.

Ranger walked to the closet that held the skeleton and unlocked it. It was wearing a replica of Peter Capaldi's red lined jacket, and sunglasses but I was pretty sure Angie was right about him. That looked like real bone.

"Not fiberglass," Ranger said. He examined the long bones of the skeleton and shook his head, "And no ID markers."

He checked out a few other things, and then he touched a dimple in the spine of the skeleton and looked at the rib cage. "You're not going to like this," he said. He pointed to the dimple and a chip out of a rib. "Those are from bullets, and these marks on the rib that look like scratches? Those are from a blade."

"Ranger," I said. "His shoulder, is it real?"

Ranger shook his head, "It looks like his shoulder and elbow are artificial."

He examined them carefully, and pointed to a serial number, "If I had to guess they are probably from the old skeleton."

"I think I can tell you why," I said.

"Yes?"

"Waldo Dickerson had his elbow and shoulder replaced after a car accident when he was in college."

"And you know this how?"

"My dad told me," I said. "He used to play catch with Mr. Dickerson when he was a kid. He told me that before Dickerson was a teacher, and before the accident, there was a pretty good chance that he was looking at the big leagues."

"How did this come up?" He asked.

I recounted the hour, or so we'd been apart, and he put the skeleton back in the closet.

"I'm going to suggest that you call Morelli in the morning," he said.

"Why the morning?"

"Because there's a school dance on," he said. "It'll just be a pain in the ass, and Dickerson isn't going anywhere."

"Ranger," I said, "Remember who you're talking to for a minute. You've said that and now that body is at best, going to get stolen, at worst, the school is going to either catch fire, explode, or it's going to turn out that Psycho Kermit will have arranged for a massive sinkhole to swallow the school up."

"You forgot getting sucked into the Upside-down," he said and pulled out his cell phone.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Calling Morelli," Ranger said.


	10. Chapter 10

**AN: Thanks to everyone who's reading, reviewing, sticking with me even though I haven't had the most regular publishing schedule... I really do appreciate it!**

Ranger left me to wait in the classroom for Morelli, alone. He wanted to inform the principal that there was a dead body in the science room that shouldn't be there and that the police had been notified. He was also going to gently suggest installing real cameras on the entrances and exits to the school. I had a suspicion that the middle school was about to get considerable security upgrades, gratis. Partly because Angie was going to this school and she was family, and partly because it was good for his karma to protect the kids.

Joe walked into the classroom, his shirt rumpled as though he'd slept at his desk, and his jeans had that day two or three softness to them, that suggested it had been a while since he'd had a chance to change.

"Working a double?" I asked.

"More like a triple," Joe said. "There's a flu going around, and we're more shorthanded than usual. As soon as I leave here, I'm going home to eat something that isn't cold leftovers, and then I'm going to get into my bed and not leave it for at least 18 hours."

"And to think, the last time we met at a crime scene you were bragging about being well rested."

"Yeah, that statement really came round to bite me in the ass," Joe said, "So you think you've found Dickerson, in his classroom?"

"Well, what are the odds that another guy with a fake shoulder, a fake elbow, and the same injuries he had, would turn up in his classroom?"

"I'd say they were pretty slim," he said. "Why didn't you call Bucky?"

"Because I don't have Bucky's number in my phone."

"You haven't been all over this for the last few weeks?"

"No," I said. "Ranger asked me not to. You mean you don't know?"

"I've taken some personal leave," he said. "I just started back last week."

"Everything all right?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, "It's great. I…"

We were interrupted by Joe's pocket suddenly sounding out, with a loud, "Scooby Doobie Doo!"

Joe laughed and pulled his phone out of his pocket, switched it to vibrate, and read a text message. It buzzed twice more and, he grinned as he wrote a response. His phone rang then, and he shook his head and answered with, "You know, I'm working."

He listened for a few minutes and then chuckled. It was his, I-know-I'm-going-to-get-laid, laugh and I rolled my eyes.

"Hello? Dead body?" I whispered.

He shrugged with mock innocence because the girl on the other end of the phone wouldn't let him get off of the damn thing. "I'd say that's a more than fair trade. Just leave your keys on the seat, there will be a bunch of uniforms here who'll keep an eye on your car. Yeah, I'll hold you to that."

He hung up his phone.

"Are you done?" I asked.

"My girlfriend wants to borrow my Jeep for a couple of hours. She's going to the hardware store, and her car is too small for what she needs to buy."

"You were having phone foreplay," I said.

"I promise you I wasn't. She was bribing me with food," Joe said, "You're just confused because you never called me for anything normal; it's always a dead body, work, something blowing up, one of our families has done something to freak you out, and you're slightly hysterical."

"That's not true," I said. "I called you for things like borrowing the car."

"You either stole it, or you texted," Joe said. "If you didn't call me for one of the aforementioned reasons, it was to check in after you'd done something crazy or were about to do something you knew I wasn't going to like."

I thought about it, and wow he was right. I don't know what a normal conversation with Joe is like on the phone.

"So you have a girlfriend," I said. Joe smirked at me because he totally knew I knew who he was sleeping with, but he was in a good mood and willing to play along.

"I do," he said.

"Is it serious?"

"It's looking that way," he said.

"Has she met the family yet?"

"Most of it," he said, "I've been keeping her away from Bella, but she's basically besties, with Tony."

"Is that a good thing?" I asked. The women in Joe's family were saints. Almost all of them were, with the possible exception of his grandma Bella who is a terrifying woman, and probably a witch. The men, on the other hand, were dogs, alcoholics, and had an inability to keep their hands and dicks to themselves. Joe was doing what he could to distance himself from his family's reputation, but Joe's brother Tony was doing his best to live up to it. Tony's wife once shot him in the ass with a nail gun because she caught him cheating. They were still together, but he'd moved on to other affairs.

"Yeah," he said. "She's not Tony's type, but she's kicking his ass in their fantasy baseball pool and does home inspections on the side when business is slow, so she's his kind of people."

Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out some latex gloves and handed me a pair. He put his on and examined the skeleton, "Remind me about this guy again. He was the muppets guy?" Joe asked.

"Yeah," I said, "He was shot, bludgeoned, stabbed and vacuumed."

"We should check to see if he was related to Rasputin," Joe said. "You're sure this was him?"

"No," I said, "But those are real bones."

"Why's he dressed like the Doctor?"

"Because Dickerson always dressed the skeleton like the outgoing Doctor as an homage."

"I don't know how I feel about that," Joe said. "Have you looked for anything else inside the Tardis?"

"Nope, just found the skeleton and called you," I said. Joe went into the cupboard and shone a flashlight around, and not really seeing anything, he closed it and called Bucky.

"Still behind a desk?" I asked when he got off of the phone.

"No," Joe said, "But this is Bucky's case. I know basically nothing about the investigation, except for what you've told me."

"I thought he was keeping you informed?"

"I took time off, remember?" Joe said. Ranger texted me to let me know he was going back to Rangeman to get some temporary security cameras and would be back in a bit. While we waited, Joe and I shot the shit, in a totally normal fashion. He looked really good. Yes, he was tired, needed a haircut and to spend some quality time with his razor, but he was smiling a lot, and there was something about his body language that I hadn't seen in a really long time.

"I'm trying to figure out if it's the time off, or your girlfriend's influence?" I said.

"What?"

"You don't look like you hate your job," I said. "It's been a while since you didn't look like you hated going to work."

"Pretty hard to hate your job when you get a case that involves both Doctor Who and the Muppets," he said. "Tell me you haven't been half expecting this pile of bones to turn into Jodie Whittaker?"

"I mean, would that be the weirdest thing to ever happen to me?" I asked.

Joe was about to reply when Bucky walked in, and I noted that Bucky wore really baggy jeans. Was it to accommodate his bear-like anatomy, or was it to add fuel to the myth?

"You're a pain in the ass," Bucky said, as he scowled at me and snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.

"Hey!" I said, "I've been nothing but co-operative since I started this."

"Do you know how many Muppet Baby costumes there are in the New York area?"

"No," I said, "But I wasn't the one who dressed up as one, so don't be pissed off at me."

"I read about you, and there are two things I know to be fact. The first is that you're a fucking magnet for this weird shit because you get all friendly with these weirdo types."

"Yeah, and?"

"It makes you a pain in the ass," Joe said, "Because there are all kinds of factors one needs to take into account. I mean were the Muppets after Dickerson or were they after you? History tells us that the odds favor them being after you, which means we would be wise to chase down any asshole who has a hate on for you this week, or a weird obsessive love…"

"We think Leitrim gave me a giant peanut butter statue of David for a wedding present," I said. "It has a big giant dong that a bunch of dogs fought over."

"I'd have paid to see that," Joe said.

"It's probably on YouTube."

"And then…" Bucky said, "There's the fact that on every case you've ever worked on with this idiot here, you've kept shit from him. You pretend to play all nicey-nice, but you only tell him half of the truth, and then you'll stumble across something and have to fill him in. When if you'd just told him the shit in the first place, you might have been able to get the case solved a million fucking years earlier."

"Actually," I said, "I was protecting him. If I tell him everything he gets heartburn, and his blood pressure goes up, and there's this vein in his forehead that starts to throb and gets so big it develops its own gravitational field. I'm worried that if I let it get too strong it's going to start sucking things up, and I don't want him to get bludgeoned by a mailbox while he's dealing with his acid reflux."

"Thanks for that, Cupcake," Joe said, "Now tell us what you're keeping from me this time."

"Nothing," I said. "I swear. I gave everything to Bucky and dropped it. I've spent the last few weeks doing research for a project Ranger is working on that isn't even remotely related to this."

"Why?" Joe asked. "You're like a Pit Bull with a bone when you have a case."

"Ranger asked me not to," I said.

"He just asked you not to, and you agreed to it?" Joe said.

"He said, 'please,'" I said with a shrug.

"So then how did you stumble on this?" Bucky asked.

So I told them about Angie's suspicions, and Joe frowned. "Is she all right?"

"She's a bit freaked out, but mostly just pissed off that nobody would listen to her," I said.

"I'll have to talk to her," Bucky said.

"No," Joe said. "I'll talk to her. She's scared, and she'll probably say more to me because she knows me."

"And she has a huge crush on you," I said.

"It's not me she likes," Joe said, "She's got a thing for one of my nephews."

"Guess again; she's in the gym right now with one of the Molnar boys," I said.

"She's lying to you," Joe said. "She's been going steady with my nephew since June. She probably told you it was one of Mary-Lou's kids, so you didn't flip out when she told you she's been necking with a Morelli."

"How the hell do you know that, when I don't?"

"Because I saw them at your reception," he said.

"Why the hell didn't you tell me?" I demanded.

"Because I was drunk and about to get laid," he said. "But we've wandered off topic, and if you bust Angie for what I've just told you, she's not going to say anything to any of us. Now, how the hell did she know what she was looking for?"

"History project that's due in October. She's investigating a crime from 1912 and recognized the head wounds as being similar to her victim's. I told her you'd give her a copy of the original case files, and maybe let her look at the evidence."

"Oh great," Joe said.

"It'll be a good way to get her to talk," I said.

"Who's the victim?" Joe asked.

"Stephanie Prune," I said, "She died on April 15, 1912."

"Are you fucking with me right now?" Joe said, "because I might be in a good mood, but that could change really damned fast."

"I promise, that's what she told me," I said, and crossed my heart.

"Why am I not reassured?" Joe asked.

"Because you're not that trusting," I suggested.

Joe brought in a crime scene team, and I made my exit and found Ranger waiting for me by the car.

"And?"

"He thinks it's Dickerson, too," I said. "I may have forgotten to tell him about Angie's forensic report, with all of its pictures of the skeleton and everything, because I seriously doubt he's going to share evidence with me."

"You're probably right," Ranger said, as he started the car. "What's your next move?"

"You're not going to ask me to back off? Things are still the same. There's still danger. Nothing has been resolved with your other thing."

"Angie's family, and she's involved now," Ranger said. "I doubt she's in any trouble, but I'd like this to be dealt with, fast."

"Okay," I said, "Well now we figure out where the hell the Muppets came from. Those costumes didn't look new, and maybe we see if we can't pull the accident report from the wreck that destroyed Dickerson's career."

"I'll look into the insurance angle," Ranger said. "Maybe there's something there."

When we got to Haywood, I went into my office, only to find it fully occupied by Minnie, Lester, Bobby, and Tank. "Uhh, guys?"

"Sorry Steph," Minnie said, "I needed more space than I have at my desk, and you've been using Ranger's office. We can relocate to the conference room."

"Don't worry about it; I'll just go home," I said. I grabbed my laptop from the desk and backed slowly out of the office. It looked like they were planning either a serious prank or some kind of serious military operation. I took the elevator upstairs, and parked on the sofa, and started searching the internet for Muppet Baby Costumes.

Now I like to think I'm an open-minded kind of person. I'm not a prude by nature, and I'm not particularly judgemental, but I did start to wonder what the world was coming to when I stumbled across Halloween costumes of Bert and Earnie, that were basically bootie shorts, and bras that Lula would find revealing. I mean the Big Bird costume that looked like a flapper dress, I could deal with, but there is a line you know?

I gave up a general internet search for Muppet Baby costumes because they were pissing me off, and getting me almost nowhere. What I did turn up, was that the outfits from the warehouse weren't right. All of our muppets were wearing diapers. The only one there that night who should have been wearing a diaper was Rowlf. In the original cartoon, Kermit wore a cute little sailor suit, Miss Piggy wore a pink dress with little bloomers, and Animal wore red shorts, a bonnet, and a yellow t-shirt.

It gave me a new angle to start searching, but for the hell of it, I decided to run a search in the federal crime databases to see if any other crimes had been committed by people dressed as Muppet Babies.

While it was running, I changed the focus of my internet search. The only muppet I got a good look at was Animal, so I started combing through pictures of old Parades, and theme park costumes. I started searching CosPlay, and made a list of costume rentals and went on Etsy and searched for Muppet Baby Costumes, looking only for homemade costumes.

For all of that, I got a lot of things that weren't anywhere close to the Animal I saw, and a crime report of Muppet Babies knocking over several jewelry stores. Sadly that happened in 1986, during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Miss Piggy and Gonzo snuck off, they said to go to the bathroom, but the police report said they suspected that they had snuck off to do something else. They were mugged, and their costumes stollen. The costumes were then used in a bunch of armed robberies, and collected again four days later, when one of the guys was found passed out drunk, in Queens, wearing the Gonzo head and smile.

This wasn't particularly useful information, but what I was able to glean from the report was that Gonzo wasn't accurate. The picture of the costume showed Gonzo wearing plain red overalls, but there was no yellow chicken on the front. There were no pictures of the Piggy costume in the report, and when I looked up pictures from the 1986 parade, I was unable to find any good shots of the other muppets, except for baby Rowlf.

I printed it off, and then out of a moment of sheer smart ass brilliance, I went online and found some other Rowlf the Dog cosplay pictures and put them in a lineup card. I was working my way through the list of costume suppliers, calling to ask if they had muppet baby costumes when Ranger came in.

I handed him the card. "Do you recognize any of these dogs?"

He smirked and looked at the lineup.

"This one," he said, and unbelievably pointed to the one from the 80's.

"You're joking," I said.

"No," he said, "Why?"

"You're sure that's the dog you saw?"

"Babe," he said.

"Okay, so that is a picture from the 1986 Thanksgiving Parade. From that same parade, Gonzo and Miss Piggy were mugged, their costumes stollen, and guys using those costumes went on a crime spree in Queens, knocking over jewelry and liquor stores."

"Interesting," he said. "Just Gonzo and Miss Piggy?"

"Yep."

"Is there more to the police report?"

"Nope," I said. "This is all that's made it online and no pictures of Miss Piggy."

Ranger made a call to get us access to the hard copy of the files, "It's a long shot, but if Rowlf the Dog is actually the costume you saw, then it's possible this is related."

"Maybe," Ranger said. "I'm going to say something now, that I know you're going to object to. In fact, I'm pretty sure you're going to decide it's important to get in the car and drive to Moonachie."

"What?" I said.

"If this is a parade costume, then we should contact the Macy's Parade Studio in Moonachie to see if they are missing some retired costumes."

"Will there be anyone there?"

"Babe, how long do you think it takes them to make the floats in the parade."

"A few months?"

"They start work on the next year's parade the afternoon after this year's ends."

I looked at him for a long minute. I've had some dreams in my life. Things I've wanted to do since I could remember. Develop Super Powers, win the lottery, own a luxury car that doesn't get blown up… You know the usual things, but I have ALWAYS wanted to be a balloon handler in the parade. Do I want to go see where the magic happens? Fuck yes I do.

"You know what?" I said. "If they can't even take the afternoon off on Thanksgiving because they are so crunched for time, it might be best if I let them multitask while they answer questions, and that's so hard to do on the phone. I mean I bet it's all loud, so speakerphone isn't a great idea…"

"Nice thinking on your feet," he said.

"I don't suppose you have an address in Moonachie for the Studio?" I said.

"It's on State Street," he said.

"Do you want to come with me?" I asked.

"No," he said. "As fun as that would be, I have to fly to Washington in an hour. I've got Minnie digging up all of the information he can find on anyone involved in Dickerson's insurance claims. There are four companies involved, and none seem to be connected in any way."

"Four?" There was his wife's claim from her accident, the life insurance policy, and the claim from his own accident. "What was the other one?"

"The driver of the car that hit him," Ranger said.

"And?"

"So far nothing. Minnie's doing deep background on the people involved."

"Does he have time for that, given the operation he's taken over my office with?"

"He's going to be a bit distracted, so you may have to keep on top of him," Ranger said.

"Seriously, what is he doing?"

"Traveling a little too far outside the box," Ranger said. He went into the bedroom and put together an overnight bag, and then he kissed me goodbye, leaving me to try to decide who I wanted to bring with me to the Parade Studio.


	11. Chapter 11

_**An: Thank you for reading! I'm glad you are enjoying the story so far, and hope you continue to do so!**_

Lula maneuvered herself out of the G-Wagon and looked at the building. She was wearing poison green maternity leggings, with pink baby footprints on them, and a hot pink tank top that read, "I don't waddle. It's called Pregnancy Swagger."

She was about six months pregnant, and so far she'd suffered through morning sickness, and the worst gas known to man. Aside from having to be careful about how much effort she put into sneezing, she was feeling pretty good now, and she was tired of being cooped up in the recording studio in the basement of the house she shared with Sally Sweet, the father of her child. So when I had to think about who I knew would truly appreciate where we were going, I gave her a call. She was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet in her driveway when I pulled up in front of her house, I thought maybe she had to pee, but she was actually just excited. In the 67 mile drive from Trenton to Moonachie, we stopped four times, twice for her to pee, and twice for snacks.

When Ranger gave me the street address for Parade Studio, I resisted the urge to look for it on Google Streetview. I didn't want to know, I wanted to be surprised. I wanted there to be giant statues of past balloons, maybe Snoopy on the roof with his flight hat and goggles, and Santa's sleigh in the front. So to pull up and discover that it was an ordinary red brick building, with grey-brown accents, was a bit disappointing. The only thing whimsical about it was a discrete sign that showed a cartoon parade in silhouette.

"Maybe they're going for the understated look because they don't want to have people bugging them all the time for tours," Lula suggested.

"Maybe," I said.

We went to the front door and were met by reception.

"Hi," I said, "I'm Stephanie Manoso, and I'm a private investigator, hired to look into a missing person. I was wondering if you could help me?"

"Who's your friend?"

"My partner, Lula," I said.

"You say this is for a missing person?"

"Yes," I said, "He's a school teacher, and his wife is really sick. We'd like to find him so if there are medical decisions to be made, he can make them."

"I'll get my boss," she said.

She had us wait for a few minutes and directed Lula to a bathroom. Lula had just come back when the manager came up. She was a bubbly woman by the name of Shirley Galbert. She was five seven, with bottle blonde hair, a big toothy smile, and dressed in baby pink slacks and a baby blue sweater set. It may have been an oven outside, but the AC in the office was cranked, and it was chilly.

"What can I do for you?" she asked. I introduced Lula and myself again, and she frowned.

"And it brought you to us?" she said. "Come back to my office, and we'll talk."

She led me through to her office the walls of which were covered with pictures from previous parades and little statues of past floats.

"So tell me what's going on?" Shirley asked. I had my lie all lined up, and ready to go. I didn't really want to go into too many details just yet.

"We have a witness who claims that the last person they saw Mr. Dickerson with, was disguised in a muppet costume, and it looks like the costume was from the 1986 parade. We were wondering if it was missing?" I said.

"What's the costume?"

"Rowlf the Dog," I said. I showed her the picture, and she shook her head.

"It's not one of ours," she said.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"The 1986 parade didn't have the Muppet Babies in it. There were Muppets, but no Muppet Babies."

"That doesn't make sense," I said. "This picture is from a newspaper article about the Parade in 1986."

She did some typing on her computer, and shook her head, "It must be mislabeled in the archives. From what I can see, there was a Kermit the Frog Balloon to celebrate the Muppet's 30th birthday, but that was the extent of the Muppet's involvement. That year was all about He-Man, and Alvin and the Chipmunks."

"There is a police report about two performers dressed as Muppets getting mugged," I said. "It's dated November 27th, 1986."

"Let me look again," she said. "Kermit was the first muppet to be part of the parade as a balloon in 1977 and Kermit was there, live in muppet, to report on it. In 1979 the Muppet Cast appeared, again live, Kermit and Piggy in a Rolls Royce and the rest of the cast in the Electric Mayhem Bus. 1981 Gonzo, Fozzie, and Kermit were in Beauregard's Taxi, and there wasn't another live appearance of the muppets until 1987 when Jim Hensen and Kermit were there to accept an award for services to the parade. The only time the muppets appeared as costumed performers was in 1994 and it was an adult Kermit and Piggy. After that, all appearances by muppets have been live."

I pulled out a picture of the Gonzo costume from the Police Report and handed it to her.

"Is that one of yours?" I asked. "Maybe something is missing in your records? Because the Rowlf the Dog picture was definitely from the parade."

"We can check with costumes," she said and stood up. "I'm assuming you came all the way here from Trenton when a call would have sufficed because you wanted a peek at the production floor?"

"That's a big yes," I said.

She motioned for us to follow, and she gave us a tour as we made our way to costumes. She showed us how the balloons were made, and explained how they were first drawn in great detail, then sculpted, to scale, out of clay, then molds were made, and finally, the models of the balloons were painted precisely how they would appear in the parade. Each balloon had two models, the second one left white, with lines to show the construction of the balloon, and where inflation points and lines went. We also learned that the balloons had to be painted while they were inflated, so their paint didn't crack.

"So if I wanted to be a balloon operator…" I said, as we walked by some new floats (that we were told had about 100-200lbs of glitter on them, and even though some were as tall as three stories, they all had to be disassembled to fit through the Lincoln Tunnel, and each component could be no more than 12.5 feet tall, and 8.5 feet wide.)

"You have to either work at Macy's or be sponsored by someone who does, and there has to be a spot open on a team before you can do it, and if you get a spot, then you have to take a course at Columbia University in balloon aerodynamics and handling."

"How long is the course?" I asked. Jeeze Louise, you need a University degree to do anything nowadays.

"Oh only two days," she said with a laugh. "Now, this is what you really want to see."

She showed me a big red cedar chest, standing like a wardrobe, and unlocked it, revealing Santa and Mrs. Claus's costumes.

"Oh my God," I said. "Can I…May I touch it?"

"Sure," she said. "Want some more parade trivia?"

"Yes," I said, "Yes I do."

"When they filmed the Parade Scene in Miracle on 34th Street in 1946, it was done during the actual parade, and Santa that year was played by Edmund Gwenn, the actor who portrayed Santa in the movie. All of the parade shots are real."

"Well that's just cool," I said. Lula nodded. I looked at her, and she looked like she was going to cry. She was petting Mrs. Claus's jacket, reverently. "What's wrong?"

"It's just so beautiful. I mean I watch it every year and this just a dream come true. I just…" She paused, looked alarmed, and clenched her legs together, and made this weird squeaking noise as her eyes bugged out.

"Uhhh," I said, "What was that?"

"I sneezed; what the fudge did you think it was?"

"What the fudge?" I asked.

"I'm pregnant and standing next to Santa's shit. I'm trying not to cuss."

"Anyway," I said. "As fun as this is, we really do need to know about the costumes."

"I'll go get the head of our costumes department," Shirley said.

She walked away, leaving the Santa Closet open. "I want to try on Mrs. Claus's coat," Lula said. "Help me."

"No," I said. "You most certainly will not try on Mrs. Claus's jacket. If you wreck it, you're going to have to pay for it, and I think it's probably expensive."

"You saying I'm too fat to fit into Mrs. Claus's coat?" Lula said.

"No," I said, "I'm afraid you're going to sneeze and pee on it."

"I'm not going to pee on Mrs. Claus," Lula said.

"Leave it alone," I said.

"You never were any fun," she muttered and made the weird sneezing sound again.

"Aren't you afraid you're going to bust an eardrum or pop an eyeball by sneezing like that?"

"It's the only way I don't pee," she said. "And I think I might be allergic to cedar."

"Can't you do Kegels or something to help that?" I said.

"It ain't working. I'm doing a permanent fudging kegel every damn day. When I sneeze I let go, and that's the problem."

"Don't say, 'fudging kegel,' it sounds like some kind of doughnut. Like a chocolate cruller or something," I said.

"I should tell that to my friend Noreen," Lula said, "She sells porno cakes online."

"The idea is all hers," I said. Shirley returned with a woman about grandma's age and introduced us to her as Trina.

"Trina has been part of the parade for fifty years; if anyone is going to know anything about your Muppets, and costumes, it's going to be her," Shirley said.

Trina sized me up and narrowed her eyes. It was difficult to tell if she'd done this because she was suspicious of me, or nearsighted. "I have two costumes here that I have been told were part of the parade, but Shirley can't seem to find them on her computer," I said.

"That's because she doesn't actually know how to use her darned computer," Trina said, "I have paper records of everything over here; let me see what I can find. What year is this supposed to be?"

"1986," I said. Trina motioned for me to follow her to a bank of file cabinets, and she found her file on the 1986 parade. "We're looking for Rowlf the Dog, and Gonzo," I said. "Miss Piggy and Animal too, if you have them."

"Nope, the only muppet that year was a balloon. One of the few years around then where the Kermit balloon wasn't a pain in the ass. In '85 it got weighed down by rain and ripped itself all up the belly. We were always having problems with him."

"This costume is from that parade though," I said, "I saw this picture on lots of new sites, and these are muppets walking in the parade."

She looked at the picture of Rowlf, and then the Gonzo picture from the police report.

"These aren't ours," she said. "We put a ton of detail into everything; I mean a lot of shit that doesn't even show up on TV we do because we're that faithful to the design. We're not going to miss something like the chick on Gonzo's overalls."

"I'm impressed you noticed it wasn't there."

"He was going to be a balloon that year. We keep talking about a Gonzo balloon. I think they were considering Gonzo as Charles Dickens for next years', but who knows? I just make the costumes."

"Did you do any mockup costumes?" I asked.

"Nope," she said, "We don't have the time, and these costumes aren't cheap, and they are time-consuming to make. The collection is insured for millions. We're not going to the trouble to get this much detail unless we're going to make the thing properly. Something about this is familiar though."

She flipped through the pages of the file, and looked at me, "Right, there's an incident report. A bunch of college students made muppet costumes and tried to join the Kermit Balloon on the march. They were involved for maybe about ten minutes before parade officials removed them from the street, and they ran before they got arrested."

"That's not in the police report about Gonzo's mugging," I said.

"Want a copy of our incident report?" she asked.

"Yes please," I said. Trina took the file away and came back with the copies, and then squinted over at the Santa Wardrobe.

"What the hell? How many times do I have to tell her that she can't play dress-up with the costumes? She's like a fucking kid," Trina said.

I turned around, and Lula was wearing Mrs. Claus's dress and jacket, her clothes were draped over the top of the chest and Shirley was wearing a sparkly clown outfit. Things were going well, and then Lula's face screwed up, and she started frantically trying to get out of the costume, but a button was stuck, and she was beginning to change colors. Then all of the sudden she erupted.

"CHOOOHAAAAAAA!"

When the noise escaped her, she flailed, and her hands ended frozen in what looked like a weird martial arts pose.

"I don't get it," Trina said, "Is she threatening us, so we don't make her change?"

"No, she's allergic to cedar," I said.

"And it causes her to break out in Kung Fu?"

"Dyslexic Asthma," I said.

Lula very calmly took off the jacket and handed it back to Shirley. "Imma need your restroom."

Shirley slowly nodded her head and pointed to a ladies room closer than the one Lula used before. Lula waddled away, and I looked at Trina. "How hard is it to clean that costume?" I asked.

"You're good. That one is machine washable," Trina said.


	12. Chapter 12

**_AN: Happy Halloween a day late! As always, thanks for reading and reviewing. I really appreciate it. Anything familiar belongs to Janet, and the mistakes belong to me. Woohoo!_**

It turned out that six students from Linton University, a little school just outside of Boston, dressed up as Muppet Babies, to crash the Santa Claus Parade. They said they just wanted to get on television. It couldn't be a coincidence that Dickerson's alma mater was the source of the costumes, so I started to do some more digging.

A quick phone call to the school told me pretty much what I needed to know about it. In 1986, the school was fairly new on the scene. They had only been open for twenty years, and while they had some top-notch professors, and a beautiful, modern facility, they were far from well known, and couldn't really compete with the other schools nearby. So as part of a marketing course, one of the teachers challenged the students to think of how to make the school a household name.

A few of the student decided that they would do it by staging a bunch of stunts in Muppet Baby costumes, and the parade was to be the first of their antics. However, when Piggy and Gonzo got mugged, and the others were arrested without so much as a mention in the paper, they abandoned the plan. The costumes were still occasionally used during pep rallies and Frat House parties.

My conversation with the woman in administration was cut short by the sound of Lula snoring in the seat next to me, and I had to pretend we were going past a construction site. The woman on the phone said she'd email me everything she had about the incident, and I had more police reports to look up.

I swung around to Lula's house dropped her off, and went to Haywood. I went up to the apartment where Julie was chilling on the sofa, watching the Trolls movie with a riveted Lunch Box.

"S'up?" I asked. Not that I minded her hanging in the apartment with me, but I would have thought she'd be all about her own place.

"I was getting bored all by myself. I have two sisters, and it's always loud at home."

"I know that feeling, but when I was a kid, I was the one making the noise," I said.

"Don't suppose you'd mind if I crashed on the sofa?" She asked.

"Not at all," I said. "I'd offer to share the big bed with you, but I have no idea when Ranger is going to get home, and if it's late, he usually just falls into bed."

"It's all good, I like this sofa," she said.

I was planning to go over everything I'd found so far while watching the Mets game, but apparently, that option was out. I took everything into Ranger's den and spread it out on the surface of his desk, and started making a list of everything I knew so far. Which was not much.

We hadn't run proper background checks on Sadie to see if she was the reason this all began. So I started one, and one on her mother. While they were running, I used another search engine of Ranger's that allowed me access to Dickerson's phone records. That was a complete bust. He called his wife, the pharmacy, and the middle school. He didn't text, so that wasn't at all helpful.

I was about to call it quits when I remembered the private investigator's reports. I read through them all, and there was nothing that stood out from the weekend before Dickerson disappeared, so I called the number on one of the invoices, and got a man named, Gavin Archer.

"Archer here, what can I do for you?"

"Hi," I said, "I'm Stephanie Manoso, I'm a private investigator from Rangeman Securities. I'm looking into the disappearance of Waldo Dickerson, and I was wondering if you could help me?"

"Wally's a good man," Archer said, "Before you ask, she knew I was following her around. I wouldn't do it until he told her what I was up to. I didn't want to get busted for stalking her."

"Was it always you on her tail?"

"Sometimes it was my kid, but usually it was me. I'm 62 years old, and I'm not as spry as I used to be, so my kid does all of the tough shit, and I follow Bernadette around, keeping my distance, and answering the phones from my car."

"On the weekend before he disappeared, was there anything strange about her behavior, did she meet up with anyone unexpected?"

"Not that I can remember. Hang on," Archer said. I heard the sound of a turn signal, and then some typing on a keyboard. "On the Saturday she went to the gas station to fill up her car, and to get gas for the lawnmower. She spoke to three men. One was a gas station attendant, one was a guy she seemed to know from somewhere, but I didn't get his name, and the other guy was some idiot waiting in line for the pumps who decided to honk his horn at her to get her to hurry up, before she was finished getting her gas. After that, she went home and mowed the lawn."

"And Sunday?"

"Nothing," he said. "Bernie didn't leave the house that I'm aware of. Says in my notes that she gardened for about two hours at around midday while I was sweating my balls off in my car. Want me to send you everything I have from that weekend?"

"You don't mind?" I asked.

"No skin off my nose. It's not like I'm afraid of you stealing my work. You work for Rangeman; you've got better shit to do than monitor a middle-aged semi-retired housewife while she runs her errands."

A few minutes later I had the file, and I sent the dates and times of the interaction at the gas station to Hector hoping he could get me security footage.

I fell into an uneasy sleep, and the next morning I dragged myself out of bed and found an email from Hector waiting for me.

The footage showed Bernadette getting out of the car. She spoke to the gas station attendant, a young guy about Minnie's age, with long hair, and a pleasant demeanor. Then another guy came out of the store and saw her. He said something to her that caused her to smile politely, and then there was a clear lightbulb moment where she realized who the guy was, and she hugged him.

They chatted for a few minutes and then both of them started and looked towards a minivan parked behind them. Whatever the guy said, was offensive because her friend walked over to the car and there looked like there was going to be an altercation. Then the van pulled away, and the driver flipped them the bird. Her friend helped Bernadette back into her car and loaded the jerry cans into the back. She left, and he paid the kid who pumped the gas.

The minivan was an older model, probably from the 80's or 90's, but what make it was, I had no idea, and he'd pulled up in such a way that you couldn't make out anything more than the fact that there were New Jersey plates on it. I emailed Hector asking him if he knew what make the van was. He replied with one word. "No."

It was a cool looking thing, with a pointed nose on it, all black with red pin striping down the side, and blacked out windows. If I were ever to need a minivan, I'd look for something like it. I mean it was like if Knight Rider were to have to drive a van, it would probably be this one. I started thinking of it as KITT's mom. But it didn't really get me anywhere, so I turned my attention to the guy at the gas station.

If he were the one responsible for the threat Dickerson spoke about, then it wasn't obvious to Bernadette that she was being threatened, and he didn't give a damn about keeping his face from the camera. He'd paid in cash, so there was no way to trace him that way, but maybe the kid who was pumping Bernadette's gas for her, remembered something.

When I went to see if Connie wanted to ride shotgun again, I found her at the front desk teaching Julie some computer program, so I decided to ride solo. I went down to the garage and looked at the giant gas guzzling Mercedes and the pretty little Boxter, and I decided that since it was actually a beautiful day outside, I'd risk driving my car. It took me twenty minutes to get to the gas station, and when I pulled into the lot, I couldn't justify stopping for gas, so I decided that I'd use my sweet tooth as my excuse for being at the store.

When I walked into the gas station, I was surprised to find Bernadette's friend, stocking shelves. He was wearing a name tag that read, Reardon.

"Was there something I could help you with?" Reardon asked. He wasn't wearing a uniform, but instead a pair of khaki shorts and a mint green golf shirt.

"Tasty Cakes?" I said.

"We don't stock them anymore," he said. "It's a major bummer because they're my favorite, but they weren't selling."

"That, really sucks," I said. Reardon nodded his agreement.

"Anything else maybe?" He asked.

"No," I said. "Damn. I'm driving all the way to Mystic today, and I thought I'd stock up on road snacks."

He looked out of the window, at my Boxter, which was the only car in the lot, besides the one that was presumably his. "It's a nice car to have to go on a long road trip by yourself."

"Yep," I said.

"What takes you to Mystic?" He asked me. There wasn't a flicker of recognition from this guy. So if he was one of the Muppets, he definitely wasn't Animal. So I decided to risk it and give him a partial truth.

"Look," I said. "I'm going to level with you. I'm doing some investigative work for a private law firm. This guy Dakota Ackman let his kid go joy riding in his minivan, and he made a game out of making YouTube videos of people's reactions to being hurried at the pumps. I gather he was quite aggressive with these women, and one of them was so upset that she sped away from the gas station in tears, and wrote off her car. I'm driving around Trenton going from gas station to gas station seeing if anyone remembers an incident like this? I'm hoping someone has a surveillance camera that records audio. The stuff I've been told he has said is vile, and more than a little threatening. So far it's just a civil suit, but it looks like there could be criminal charges pending."

"I know exactly what you're talking about. We had an incident like that a couple three weeks ago. Asshole kid pulls up and starts yelling at a customer that she needs to stop gabbing and actually pay attention to the fact that other people need to get gas. Like she is responsible for how fast our attendants pump gas? The poor thing was frightened half to death. I ended up paying for her gas out of my own pocket because she was so scared, and I didn't want her to stop coming here."

"I don't suppose you have the altercation on video, with audio?"

"I don't record audio," he said.

"Can I have your name in case they decide to call you as a witness?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. His name was Reardon Maxwell. I put it down in my notepad, and I picked out some brain food for the car and was paying for it when something caught his attention on his security monitors, and he ran out of the store.

I followed him and found Harvey Leitrim trying to get into my trunk. Leitrim looked up, saw me and decided to take off, but Reardon was too quick for him and snagged him by the shirt.

"Do you know this guy?" Reardon asked.

"I do," I said, and turned to Leitrim, "Dude what the hell?"

"I just wanted to give you a present," he said.

"Like David?" I said.

"Wasn't he great?" Reardon said, "I'm super proud of him."

"He was kind of disgusting, and he half melted all over my mother's driveway."

"I saw that," he said. "And it's a shame about his junk. I thought you could have fun with it, and.."

"Stop," I said. "What the hell do you want?"

"Nothing!" He said, "I just want to pay it forward."

"Pay what forward?" I asked.

"I don't want to say in front of this guy."

"Why?"

"Because he's going to think I'm a wuss," Leitrim said.

"Are you armed?" I asked.

He shook his head vehemently, no. "Fine," I looked at Reardon, and rolled my eyes, "Let him go. He's harmless."

"Are you sure?"

"Mostly sure," I said. Reardon went back into his store, and I motioned for Leitrim to get into my car. I turned on the AC and put the roof up, but I wasn't driving anywhere with him.

"What's the deal?" I asked.

Leitrim was pretty much the most average looking dude to ever be a dude. He was somewhere between twenty-five and forty. He had no serious scars on his face, his hair was mousy brown, and his eyes were brown. His complexion was slightly olive but not, and every time I'd seen him he'd been wearing a pair of Wrangler jeans, some cheap grey sneakers and some kind of t-shirt; today's t-shirt was dark brown with lego men that looked like the Beatles walking across it.

"I used to be a bastard," he said. "Like a grade A Dick Hole."

"Okay," I said. "Just so you know, breaking into my place and stealing my food, doesn't exactly elevate you from Dick Hole status."

"Oh no! He said, "It does. See I was friends with this guy, and he gave me all kinds of advice I thought was terrific, only it turned out that it wasn't. He had me all convinced that I should look at marriage the way it was initially intended in the law. You know, a contract for making kids, but like not something you really need to put your back into. So I married this girl for her money and her body, and whenever I had the chance, I'd pick up someone else. Then I met this woman. She was gorgeous. Like a ten, and she was totally interested in me. She got me, you know? She convinced me to leave my wife, and I did. She waited until the divorce was finalized, and we went to Vegas together to get married. I'm telling you she was the perfect woman. She didn't even look at the better-looking guys, she liked everything I like, and I was stoked. So we got married, and we had this great honeymoon in Vegas, and then I woke up one morning and she'd drained my bank accounts, and she was gone. She conned me out of almost two million dollars.

Now my first wife has custody of kids I never get to see, and I had to sell the house I insisted on getting in the settlement, but I had to practically give it away. Now I live in a shitty little place, I used to work for this big IT company, but it got bought out, and I was made redundant, and now I mop floors and clean toilets for a fast food chain. And seriously people are disgusting in public restrooms." Leitrim shuddered.

I usually think guys need to suck it up when they find a gross bathroom. I mean half of the time they don't have to come into contact with a toilet, so if occasionally they have to hover, it's not a big deal. Women don't really have that option ever. However, the guy who has to clean the disgusting bathrooms had my sympathy. Even if he was a creep, who stole my peanut butter.

"Anyway," Leitrim said. I figured it was Karma, and I was wondering how I could fix it. So then I thought about all of the stuff I read about you in the paper, and the people who come to you and hang around with you, and thought it's probably because helping you is good for their karma. So I did a little research and knew it was fate."

"Why?"

"Because the guy that was my idol was Dicky Orr. I mean he screwed you over big time. I thought that if I could make your life a little easier then, it would go to repairing some of my own bad mojo, you know?"

"Ohmigod," I said. "And you think stealing my peanut butter to make a giant porno statue was a good way to do it?"

"What else was I going to do with all of the peanut butter? It had olive juice in it. Do you know how gross that is?"

"You didn't have to take it!" I said.

"Yes I did! You broke up with Joe because he couldn't handle the olives in the peanut butter. At least this way it wasn't going to be a problem again."

"Yeah, but you gave it back to me in the form of a giant peanut butter monster."

"I thought you would like it," he said.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "I uhh have something you might find interesting."

"Like the Peanut Butter?"

"Muppets."

He handed me a folder, and I opened it. There were a bunch of telephoto pictures of the night of Dickerson's murder. He had all of them. Rowlf, Kermit, Piggy, Skeeter, Animal. "I was bummed that Gonzo wasn't there."

"Gonzo is probably in an evidence lockup in New York City. Piggy should be too…I wonder if that's a new costume?"

I flipped through about forty pictures, one that showed them piling into a van. "Huh," I said. It looked almost exactly like the van that harassed Bernadette at the pumps a few weeks before.

"What?"

"Nothing," I said. "Do you have anything else from that night, or when I was watching Dickerson?"

He shook his head, "I was out of town for most of that. My kids were at summer camp, and I was able to watch them without my ex-wife knowing about it."

"You're really creepy, you know that?"

"Yeah, but it's a good hobby. I mean I'm getting really good at watching people. They don't even see me anymore."

"Okay first," I said, "Stop following me. I can't help your karma, and stealing my peanut butter and breaking into my car is annoying. Second, maybe just try apologizing to your wife for being a dick hole."

"I've tried that," he said. "She told me to jump up my own ass."

"I don't really blame her," I said.

"So I have to help you," he said.

"Don't," I said, "Ranger has a low tolerance for stalkers right now, and he's probably going to shoot you for violating the restraining order."

"Yeah," he said. "Okay. But I have to help you. I mean think about it? Sally Sweet and Lula are having a baby together, and they are all happy and stuff. Your sister is married to a decent guy, and her kids are starting to be a little better adjusted. Your grandmother is hooked up with the guy who got away, and you're married to Ranger. You're good at fixing things."

"Oy," I said.

"Who is this guy?" He asked and pointed to Reardon, "Why are you bugging him?"

"Because he might be involved in a case I'm working on. I thought maybe he was one of the Muppets, but now I'm not so sure."

"I can follow him. Give me twenty-four hours, and I can tell you more about him than his mother and his doctor combined."

"No," I said. "Go home Leitrim."

"I can't do that," he said. "I told you. I need to fix my karma."

"Fine," I said. "But no doing anything illegal. No breaking and entering, no computer hacking, or anything that I figure you probably already do because… Wait." Maybe I could help Leitrim and get him off of my back.

"What?"

"Dude, you're good at following people?"

"Yeah?"

"You want real work?"

"Yeah?"

"Call this guy here. He's a private investigator who's getting too old for the legwork. He might have something for you."

He looked like he was about to hug me, so I shoved him away.

"Get out of my car and leave me alone."

He nodded excitedly, and climbed out and then dematerialized behind one of the pumps. I got out of the car again and went into the store.

"What was that all about?" Reardon asked.

"He had information about the case I'm working on, and he's a little weird," I said. "The kid who was working here that day? Any chance I can speak to him?"

"I think he's in school right now," he said.

"What's his name?"

"Wesley Riel," he said. "He goes to Lakewood School for Fine Arts."

"Thanks," I said.

I went to my car, and I looked up Lakewood on the GPS and turned on the turn by turn instructions. I was expecting, I dunno, Hogwarts or something cool and funky and modern, and for the second time in two days I was disappointed by boring reality. Lakewood looked like an ordinary high school, with yellow bricks, and boxy construction. The only thing that differentiated it from any other school in Trenton was the fact that the graffiti was genuinely spectacular. It depicted two unicorns fighting with their horns, in a pale blue and lime green cloud of stars and other space junk.

I parked in the lot, and went into the front office, and rang a little metal bell at reception. The man that greeted me was pleasant, and he introduced me to the principal of the school. There are people I can happily lie to without feeling even the tiniest niggle of guilt, and then there are people who I don't even bother with because they'll know I'm fibbing. Then there is a whole other class of people who make me feel like I've done something wrong, and that before I've opened my mouth, I've disappointed them. My dentist fits that category. So do high school principals. All of them.

Noel Lampshire, I'm sure was a lovely man, and when he spoke to me he was entirely reasonable, but that didn't stop me from breaking out into a flop sweat when I told him why I was there. He called Wesley Riel's mother, and she gave him permission to act in Wesley's interests while I asked him questions about a missing person case. Then he paged Wesley to the office.

Wesley walked in and smiled warmly at the principal, and shook my hand heartily when we were introduced. "So this is pretty cool. I get to help with a missing person case?"

"Yes," I said. "You served the man's wife the day before he disappeared. Her name is Bernadette Dickerson. There was an incident involving someone in a van? He honked at her and told her to hurry up…"

"Oh that," he said. "Yeah, Mrs. Dickerson is real jumpy, but a nice lady."

"Can you tell me what happened?"

"Some dude honked on the horn of his car and startled the crap out of her. My boss, Mr. Maxwell, he got all pissed off, and paid for her gas."

"What did the guy in the van say?"

"He was basically catcalling her with a couple of his buddies," he said. "He asked her if she liked adventure or romance. Did she think she could make her dreams come true, at the gas pump."

"Seriously?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "It was annoying, but it really freaked out Mr. Maxwell. "What about her?"I asked.

"Well she wasn't comfortable with the catcalling, but she was fine. I think Mr. Maxwell overreacted a little. But then again, I think he has a thing for Mrs. Dickerson. He's usually the one who pumps her gas when she comes in."

"And Mrs. Dickerson? Does she have a thing for Mr. Maxwell?"

"No," he said. "It's all one-sided. Usually, the only time I pump her gas is when her husband is there too, then my boss doesn't go out."

"Okay," I said. "Could you describe the guy from the station?"

"Sorry," he said, "Mr. Maxwell was in the way, so I couldn't see his face. I'd recognize the van though."

I pulled out one of the pictures Leitrim had given me and showed it to the kid. He nodded. "That's the van."

"Thanks," I said.

"The plates are different though," he said.

"You remember the plates?" I asked.

"My job is boring as fu-all get out," he glanced at the principal who cocked a warning eyebrow, "I made up a stupid game where I try to think of... rude... pneumonics to memorize plates. I'm getting really good at it."

"Really?"

"Yep," he said. "The plates at the station were 209 GPH. The ones here are YHD 876. But I'm sure it's the same van though."

"How?" I asked.

"Well, it's sort of unusual. I mean you see a lot of minivans at the gas station, but I mean they are all the same right? There are like what, three on the market right now. Sometimes we see the odd, Ford Aerostar, but an Oldsmobile Silhouette? That's weird. You don't see a lot of them, especially not ones with the badging missing off of the front. If the guy wasn't such an asshole, I might have asked him if he was willing to sell it."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it's the same make and model of a van my dad loaned my sister like ten years ago. She was in a car accident, and it was a right off. Now whenever he sees a car similar to it, he says, 'I used to have a van like that.' It drives her nuts. She said if ever saw one like it she'd get it for him just so he'd stop bothering her about it."

"You're sure it's the same car?"

"Yeah," he said. "Positive. Like I said, there aren't many of them around anymore."

"Thanks," I said and handed him my card, "If you remember anything else, please call."

"No problem," he said.

I said goodbye to both of them and went back out to my car. I was about to get in when Wesley called my name. I closed my door again and waited until he finished jogging to my car.

"I want to tell you something without Mr. Lampshire around. If he knew about this, I'd probably get expelled."

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's about Mr. Dickerson. I don't know if this is… He is a math and science teacher right?"

"Yep," I said.

"Last year a couple of the guys and I started a Fantasy Baseball League. The teachers were okay with it because it meant we'd be using math and everything, but there was money involved, and we kept that from them because we're not supposed to be gambling on school property right?"

"Okay," I said.

"It was just me and like twelve guys. We had a ten dollar a week buy in, and if for whatever reason you couldn't afford it, then it didn't matter. If you accumulated the most points that week, then you got a 70% payout of that week's pot, and the rest was set aside for whoever won the season. I was thinking about dropping out about halfway through the season because I was getting killed. I mean the injuries were getting ridiculous, and my best guys were all on the DL.

Mr. Dickerson overheard me talking to my buddy about it, and the next day he came into the gas station with a list of names. He did all of these calculations using these equations he'd developed when he was in school. He told me that if before the trade deadline I got rid of my three biggest hitters, and exchanged them for some utility players I would start to clean up. These guys weren't going to hit a lot of homers, but they had decent OBPs...On Base Percentages... and he predicted pretty much all of the injuries that were going to happen in the second half of the season. So I figured I had nothing to lose, I made the trades, and I cleaned up.

So this year when it came time to pick my team and make my trades, I asked Mr. Dickerson if he would look over what I was thinking of doing, and he lost his cool. He said he shouldn't have helped me in the first place, and that this was how people got themselves into trouble. He gave me this huge lecture on gambling and said he wouldn't help me anymore. It was bizarre."

"When did that happen?"

"I guess back in March?" He said.

"How are you doing this year?"

"Not bad," he said. "Without his math, I'm just guessing based on players with similar stats to the guys I picked last year. I don't know if that's going to help at all, but I mean it was really out of character for him."

"It sounds like it," I said, "He was my teacher when I was in middle school. If he were ever mad at you, he would call you into his classroom after school, and he'd tell you why he was disappointed and then ask you how we should fix the problem. You always walked away feeling like you'd let Santa down, and you swore you'd do better."

"Exactly. I thought something was wrong then, but I dunno. I know Mrs. Dickerson has been sick, and I thought maybe he was stressed about that."

"Maybe," I said. "I'll look into it. Thanks for your help."

"Yeah," he said.

"I don't suppose you have your stuff from last year's team on you? Or that you could email it to me?"

He shrugged his backpack off of his shoulder and pulled out a binder. "You keep it in a binder? You don't have it online somewhere?"

"Nah," he said, "My friends only think I do. They keep trying to hack my laptop because of how I cleaned up last year. So I just keep track of everything here. You can't hack a notebook you don't know exists."

He opened the binder and pulled out a section marked from the previous year. He wrote his name and cell phone number on the front.

"I don't need this stuff right now, but I'm going to want it back at the end of the season. Just call me when you're done with it. Don't bring it to the gas station, because Mr. Maxwell gets pissy when I do personal stuff on his dime. Even if it's only for a few minutes."

A bell rang, and he glanced back at the school. "I have to go, I can't miss my next class."

"Test?"

"Henley Burbage. She's cute as hell and gets all turned on when I play the piano. I'm hoping to convince her to skip last period," he said and flashed me a grin before he jogged back to the school.

I rolled my eyes. Wesley was a nice guy, but then again, Morelli could turn on the charm and seem like a nice guy at that age too, and we all know what he was really like back then.

I got into the car and decided rather than work in my crowded office, or the apartment that felt weird without Ranger in it, I'd work from a booth in Pino's. I'd ordered some tortellini for lunch, to switch things up, and I was dipping fries into the cream sauce when I saw Morelli get out of his Jeep, he was laughing, and I could make out Molly's silhouette in the passenger's seat. He jogged in and picked up some takeout, and spotted me in the booth. He came over and sat down across from me.

"Dental records matched Dickerson's. They are running a DNA test on some bone marrow to make for damn sure it's him. But we're 90% sure it's him."

"Shit," I said. "Has Bernadette been informed."

"No," he said, "And we're not going public with the murder just yet, so keep your trap shut about it. As far as anyone is concerned this is still a missing person."

"In the interest of full disclosure, I have reason to believe that the Muppets were driving an Oldsmobile Silhouette."

"Do you have a plate number?"

"I have two," I said. "Both New Jersey plates. So probably neither of them are actually registered to the minivan."

"Give them to me, I'll run them."

"Shouldn't I give them to Bucky?"

"Bucky has six active open murders with better leads than this one."

"Really," I said.

"Yep. As soon as I have half a second to…" Joe stopped when Scooby sounded from his pocket. He glanced at the readout and grinned, then flagged my waitress. "I need a Root Beer float done with mint chocolate chip ice cream. To go please."

I made a face at him.

"I don't know what to tell you," he said with a shrug.

The float came to the table, and he stood up. "Text me with the plate numbers."

"Are you going to be around the station later?"

"Nope," he said. "I'm spending the afternoon in front of my TV playing strip baseball."

"Fun," I said. "Look before you go, how good is Bucky?"

"He's a good detective, with a decent closure rate."

"Oh, okay," I said. "I'm just used to you, and your method. I'm guessing everyone is different."

"Yep," he said. "I'll talk to you later."

I nodded and started going over my stuff. Yes, the information about the van's plates sort of fell into my lap, but I'd hardly put my back out getting this information. How hard was Bucky working this case exactly? I didn't think very. I ran across this occasionally. Some Detectives liked the strange cases because it was a break from the monotony. Some didn't. They resented anything that wasn't routine, and couldn't think outside of the box enough to find answers. I suspected Bucky was the latter, and the only way Dickerson was going to get justice was if I was the one who got it for him.


	13. Chapter 13

**_AN: So I have news. I picked up a backpack the other day and pulled something in my wrist. The doctor is pretty sure it's tendonitis, and the backpack was just the tipping point for my tendons to tell me where to go. So the good news first. I have this chapter and two chapters of Molly, all ready to go. The bad news is that I'm in a splint for two to three weeks, and banned from typing with my left hand. So I'm going to take a little break. I'm going to finish both stories, I just have to get my left hand back. See you soon!_**

Rangeman in Boston wasn't like Rangeman anywhere else. It was Ranger's main training facility. It was set up more like a military base than an office complex. The office building itself was small, squat, and grey. New recruits and contract workers lived in a small dormitory-style unit, with communal kitchen and shower facilities.

The permanent staff that lived in residence lived in small one bedroom veteran style homes, with little yards, but no driveways. All cars were parked in an underground lot under the office building. I didn't have a fob for this lot, as Ranger had recently changed all of them, but I did have keys to the house, so I pulled up in front, and considered it.

I'd never actually stayed in the house; I'd just visited. It was kind of charming in a utilitarian sort of way. There was a simple peaked roof with a small chimney coming out of it. It had pristine white siding, and two small gardens on either side of the walk. And it looked like every other house on the street.

I used my key to let myself in and looked around. The kitchen was small, with only about three feet of counter space next to a sink. There was a range, with a bank of drawers next to it, and three upper cabinets. I opened these to find a few dishes, but not enough for entertaining more than one other person. The fridge had been stocked and the one pantry cupboard contained a box of Cocoa Puffs, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of white bread.

I grinned. Ella must have called to say I was coming. I took my bags to the bedroom and found a king sized bed, and walk-in closet, but no ensuite bathroom. There wasn't really any need for it in the little house. I tossed my bags into the closet and walked out. The great room was home to a small home office, a small bistro table, with two dining chairs, and a love seat that pointed at a small flatscreen television.

It had been a long drive, and in the quiet of the little house that was still bigger than my old apartment, I laid out all of my research, and chose the best pictures of the muppets to bring with me to the University in the morning, and then decided to stop working.

I had a bowl of cereal for dinner, and paired it with a beer from the fridge, and took the audiobook I'd been listening to in the car on my way out to Boston, into the bathroom to finish it before I went to bed. I drew myself a hot bath and had just stretched out in the tub when Ranger walked in, and I nearly had a heart attack.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I asked, "You're supposed to be in DC."

"I finished and had some work to do here before I came home. You're a nice surprise. Why are you here?"

"I'm here to see the costumes. If the Muppets here turned out to be the ones from our murder, then I was going to call your guys to have them come pick them up and take them back to Trenton."

"Do we have confirmation that it's Dickerson?"

"Joe told me this morning that the dental records matched," I said. "And Bucky isn't doing a damn thing. And do you know what's weird? Dickerson did a lot, for a lot of kids, and everyone is just accepting his disappearance. Usually, when it's a pillar of the community, it doesn't seem to matter what side of the law they are, if something goes down, the masses end up howling for justice. As far as I know, the only ones who really give a rat's ass that Mr. Dickerson is gone, are his wife, and my family."

"Have you run background on Buckerson?"

"I haven't," I said. "Joe likes him."

"Morelli has a lot on his plate at the moment," Ranger said, "He's not going to look too hard at a man who's doing his job. If he has a lot of open cases, and he thinks this one is a low priority because it's cold, Morelli's not really going to question it."

"Joe ran some plates for me today."

I filled him in on the van and my run in with Leitrim.

"Who do the plates belong to?" Ranger asked.

"One is registered to a 2016 Ford Fiesta that was stolen last year, and the second set of plates belongs to Pontiac Super Chief. The Super Chief, according to Joe, is sitting in a driveway on Joe's street and belongs to a 98-year-old man named Waylon Casey. Waylon has dementia and cataracts. On Saturdays his daughter and her husband come over and hang a sheet on his garage door, so he thinks he's at a drive-in. They watch old movies that are projected onto the screen and then on Sunday mornings, the son-in-law helps him wash the car."

"Have you run the daughter and the son-in-law?"

"Yeah," I said. "The report should be on my computer, but I haven't looked at it yet."

Ranger got up and retrieved my laptop. "Squeaky clean," he said. "Up to their ears in debt but handling it. No connection to the victim. Too old to have been taught by him in middle school, and their kids don't attend school in the district."

"Which to me suggests that someone in the Burg has to be involved. I mean it's probably no secret that Waylon loves his car, but he's not going to notice if it's missing its plates for a few days in the week."

"Are the plates currently on the car?"

"No," I said, "But only because Morelli has them being processed for evidence at the moment. So far there are no prints on the either of the plates or the exterior of the car, which is no surprise if it's been washed several times since then."

"Nope," he said. "So a dead end."

"Pretty much," I said.

He put my laptop down on the counter and sat on the edge of the bathtub. "I have to work tonight, but if you want company tomorrow when you go to the University, I should be available."

"Are you flying back, or are you going to ride with me?"

"I'll drive back with you," he said. "It's probably quicker than flying commercially."

"Okay," I said. "When are you heading out?"

"In about five minutes. I just came in to drop off my bag and grab something quick to eat."

He was looking at me like I was on the menu, and I wasn't entirely sure he had time for the sort of meal he had in mind. He grinned as he read my mind, and then sighed, "You're right, I don't have time, but maybe when I get back."

"Probably I'm not going to be in the bath anymore," I said.

"If you could arrange to be similarly dressed, it'll work for me."

He bent and kissed me, and then pulled me to my feet and grabbed a towel. He wrapped it around me, and we went out to the living room. He made himself a sandwich and looked at my mess.

"Shush," I said. "My office is filled with Minnie, and his caper, Julie, Rex, and Lunch Box have taken over the apartment. My old place has been sublet, and if you came back to my organizational structure on your desk, you'd have an aneurysm."

"Why has Julie taken over the apartment?"

"She was lonely in her little place because Minnie has been playing Danny Ocean in my office since you left."

"She was supposed to start work today," he said.

"She did. She and Connie were doing something with Sharepoint when I left. No idea what. She's hanging with Ella tonight, and I do feel bad for leaving her alone, but I needed to think before this case actually goes cold."

"The good news is the house is almost finished, so you won't have this problem anymore."

We were in the process of building a house. Ranger assured me that it wasn't taking for-frigging-ever. In fact, he said that things were going relatively smoothly, and very quickly. To me, it felt like it was taking a million years. Weeks and weeks of planning the layout of the building and not just from an aesthetic point of view. Captain Paranoid was building a house, with Scooby Doo. You'd better believe it was basically going to be Fort Knox disguised as a 2000 square foot bungalow.

I grabbed a shirt from my bag, and I pulled it on, "Do you buy Leitrim's story?" I asked.

"That he's a dickhole? I might not have phrased it that way, but the sentiments are the same."

"How would you have phrased it?"

"It doesn't translate," Ranger said. "I'm not happy that he's violating the restraining order, and I don't really care what his motivations are. I'm more interested in this van. There can't be many left in the US period, let alone New Jersey. It shouldn't take us long to track down, which means these guys aren't professionals. Look up how long it was in production and maybe we can narrow down the model year?"

I did a quick Google search of the van, clicked on Wikipedia, and got the information we were looking for.

"Looks like this version was built between 1993 and 1996 before they went with the more boring boxy version of other minivans," I said.

Ranger did a check and came up with five of them in New Jersey, and two in Massachusetts. So not a vast number of cars at all. This one was mostly black, and we were able to narrow the field further to two. One of which had been reported stolen, two months ago. From Boston.

"I'd be willing to bet that's the car," I said. He nodded.

He finished his dinner and looked at his watch. "I have to go. Don't go to the University without me tomorrow."

"Okay," I said. "Don't get shot."

"I'll do what I can," he said. "And I'll move your car into the garage."

"You don't trust it on the street?"

"Not your car. The Sat Nav might get ideas and decide to crash the car into the house."

He went to do his thing, and I went to bed. The next morning I woke up, alone, but not because Ranger hadn't come back to bed. His pillow had been used, and his clothes were in the laundry hamper. I guess that I was out cold when he came in, so he hadn't woken me up. I showered and decided to dress in something other than my usual clothes. For one, it was an absolutely beautiful day, and for another, it occurred to me that if I were going to spend another fifty million hours in the car, a dress would be way more comfortable.

I'd tossed one in my bag just in case, and it happened to be one that Ella had packed for me when Ranger aand I went South, and then I'd never worn in Florida because it was black. It just a simple, knee length, sleeveless cotton dress, with a little spandex in it to make it stretchy, and pockets to make it a little bit of amazing. I put on a pair of Keds to go with it and went out to the kitchen to forage for breakfast. The coffee was already on, and Ranger was sitting on the sofa going over Angie's forensic report, and it looked like he'd organized everything.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Almost 10:00," he said. "What the hell were you dreaming about? I had to sleep on the sofa."

"Really?"

"Yeah, you hit me. Twice pretty hard. I tried waking you up, but it didn't help. I figured the sofa was safer."

"I don't remember dreaming at all," I said. "Sorry."

"Something bothering you?"

"Not more than usual," I said. "I didn't sleep well the other night either. I keep feeling like I've forgotten something important."

"Any idea what?"

"Nope," I said. We had some breakfast together, and we got into one of the Endless quad cab trucks Ranger drives. We drove to the University, and when they said it was a small, private institution, they weren't kidding. There were three buildings, plus dorms that made up the entire campus, but it was pretty, and intimate in its construction. They all faced a central garden area, and there were students camped out at picnic tables, some reading, others just hanging out. Ranger and I went into the administrative building, the ground floor of which was apparently the cafeteria. Some students directed us to the elevators, and we rode them to the sixth floor.

Greg Neudendorf was the head of Student Relations. He was six feet, about fifty-two, and his reaction to our arrival was...we'll go with curious. It's more polite than fucking bizarre.

He looked at us both, and paled slightly and then sucked in his gut, and puffed out his chest. Ranger folded his arms across his chest but didn't say anything. Neudendorf immediately backed down and tried to deflate himself without letting go of his sucked in paunch. I don't know what he was going for there, but his current posture just made him look constipated.

"Hello, how may I help you?" He asked. "Are you looking to apply to our institution?"

"No," Ranger said.

"My name is Stephanie Manoso. I'm a private investigator, and a missing person investigation has brought me here."

"Who's your partner?"

"Muscle," Ranger said. It was actually impossible for Ranger to look like he was all brawn and no brain. I mean there were men on his staff who had a similar build who you were pretty sure needed a wind-up key to get their grey matter firing, but Ranger wasn't like that. Ranger was brawn and pretty much always the smartest guy in the room, and you knew it looking at him. The single word routine was for intimidation purposes, and I wanted to know why. I didn't ask him though, he usually told me when things were all said and done.

"I see," Greg said with a gulp. He looked at me, "Who is missing? And how can we help?"

"A man named Waldo Dickerson," I said. "He's an alumnus."

"Wally's missing? Since when?"

"He's been gone for about three weeks now," I said.

"Does Sadie know?"

"Sadie?" I asked.

"Sadie Moore," he said. "She's a student here, and she's been working closely with him on her Master's research."

"Why?" I asked.

"She stumbled on his research while she was trying to decide what to do with her own. She figured she could adopt the same principals to her own work, and since he's an old friend of her mother's she has been consulting with him from the beginning."

"How do you know Wally?" I asked.

"He was graduating the year I started here, and I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not exactly a large institution. It's like living in a small town. Everybody knows everybody."

"What do you know about his time here?"

"I know we were lucky to get him," he said, "He was offered scholarships to a lot of different universities. We were just starting to make a name for ourselves, and we pulled out all of the stops to get him to choose the smaller school."

"In the end why did he decide to come here?"

"We offered him a full ride scholarship," he said.

"Surely you weren't the only place to do that? I've heard that he was almost a shoo-in for the bigs. Why wouldn't he put himself on a team with a bigger chance of getting noticed?"

"We offered his girlfriend the same deal, minus the sports, of course."

"She wouldn't have gotten in if he'd chosen another school?"

"Probably not," he said. "I know it's wrong, but we were trying to establish ourselves. Abby was pretty smart too but had no money. No way she was going to University without a scholarship."

"Did she know that's why she was offered the scholarship?" I asked.

"Not so far as I know," he said. "Anyway, it was a waste in the end. That accident in his final year."

"What happened? We've been having difficulty getting an incident report."

"Well, he was driving back from Foxborough, and another car wandered into his lane. He went down a steep embankment and rolled his car several times. He's lucky to be alive. The insurance company sued the other driver because his medical bills were enormous. He got a settlement large enough to cover the remainder of his education as well as the hospital and rehab bills."

"You didn't honor the scholarship after he was injured?"

"If he'd been injured while he was playing, sure, but he wasn't. It happened off campus and wasn't related to the school in any way. You didn't drive all the way down here to ask me about his accident did you?"

"No," I said. "We're trying to trace some Muppet Baby costumes, and we were told that your school has a full set on hand."

"We don't have Gonzo, but we have the others," he said.

"Where's Gonzo?" Ranger asked.

"He got ruined years ago," he said. "I can show you the others if you want."

"Please," I said. I looked at Ranger. This guy was lying to us about Gonzo, but what would the point of that be?

Greg got to his feet and started showing us to the door when Ranger stopped to tie his shoe.

"What do the costumes have to do with anything?" Greg asked.

"We heard that he may have been involved in a prank that went wrong. It involved some muppet costumes and a Thanksgiving parade. We thought it might be related to that."

"The Thanksgiving prank was in the 80's. He would have still been in high school."

"No stone unturned," I said. "Frankly the reason I was hired is because the police are completely stumped. It's like Dickerson has fallen off of the face of the planet. I'm not Sherlock Holmes, I'm not going to outsmart the police in their investigations. What I have is the time they don't have to chase down all of these small leads, and hopefully one of them pans out."

"Why are they giving Wally special attention, and why aren't the Feds involved?"

"They have even less time to deal with it than TPD does," I said.

Ranger emerged from the office with his shoes now tied, and Greg hadn't noticed that it had taken Ranger an inordinate amount of time to complete this task. In the time it had taken Ranger to tie his laces, he could have also planted a bug, and probably a virus on Greg's hard drive. Or he could have just been tying his shoe, and one of his laces broke. Then again, a broken shoelace is something that occurs to mere mortals, and would never happen to Ranger, so probably he'd planted a listening device.

Greg led us out of the administrative building across the quad to the residences and led us down to the basement. He produced some keys and unlocked a storage room. The room was dark, cramped and instead of lockers, there were cages. It was kind of creepy and dungeon like. I had this sudden feeling like I was going to find myself in one of these cages before the case was out.

Ranger's hand was warm on the back of my neck, and I forced myself to relax. He had my back down here. Greg unlocked one of the lockers and motioned for me to go inside.

"No," Ranger said. "You first."

"It's small, there isn't room for both of us," Greg said.

Ranger took hold of the cage door and closed it. He took the keys from Greg, planted his hand on the center of Greg's chest and pushed him to the other side of the door, and opened the cage again, trapping Greg in the corridor on the other side. Ranger stood there, holding the door, like an immovable boulder. When Greg went to protest, Ranger casually lifted the back of his shirt to show Greg his gun. Greg's stopped complaining.

"You're not very trusting," Greg pouted.

"Nope," Ranger said. I walked into the cage, and sure enough, there were three of our muppets from that night. Animal, Miss Piggy, and Rowlf were there, and Ranger was right. He winged Piggy.

"These are the costumes," I said. "There's blood on this one."

Ranger pulled out a pair of cuffs and used them chain the cage door open to the cage across the corridor so Greg couldn't close us in.

"What's this about?" I muttered and nodded to Greg, once Ranger was next to me.

"I don't trust him," Ranger said. Louder he said, "You're missing muppets."

"It's Frosh Week," Greg said. "They get used a lot around now."

"I'm going to need them located," Ranger said. He walked out of the locker and released the cuffs, and then he reached into one of his many pockets and produced a heavy duty padlock that opened with a fingerprint. He waited until I was out and he put the lock on the cage.

"These are evidence," he said and pulled out his phone.

To say that Greg was thrilled with this idea was probably an oversell. He took a swing at me, and I managed to duck, causing him to punch the cage door. Ranger used Greg's momentum to shove him harder into the chainlink door. Greg bounced off of it. He fell and got up and then rushed Ranger. I heard Ranger's t-shirt rip, as Greg desperately tried to bite him. He was shaking his head like a dog, so in defense of my man, I grabbed Greg's ear and pulled him off of Ranger. As soon as he was loose, Ranger picked Neudendorf up by the front of his shirt and tossed him back down the corridor and drew his gun.

Greg froze solid and looked like he was going to mess himself. Ranger handed me the gun and unlocked the padlock again. He secured Greg at the end of the corridor again, and when Greg got to his feet and rushed the cage Ranger slammed the door against his face, and Greg fell, clutching his nose.

"Stay," Ranger said.


	14. Chapter 14

_**AN: I'm back! So here's some full disclosure for you. My parents are Audible addicts, and a particular series they enjoy has ended on a cliffhanger because the author died. For Christmas they have asked me to write the last book in the series for them. It's a medieval mystery and it's sort of my wheelhouse when it comes to writing, so I have been putting a lot of effort into it. That does not mean that I have abandoned this story. I like it too much and I wouldn't do that to you guys. I'm hoping to post a chapter every week or two but it's really going to depend on how much a roll I get on when I'm writing the other story. That being said, here is the next chapter, and I hope you enjoy it!**_

"You do have all of your shots right?" I asked while Ranger examined the torn sleeve of his t-shirt.

"If he'd touched skin, he wouldn't have teeth anymore," Ranger said. Now, this statement had a two-fold effect. One it shut Greg up, and he put his hands over his mouth, thinking that it might protect his teeth. Really, it would just have meant his fingers would have been broken in the process of breaking his teeth. The second thing was that it was bewildering to me. Ranger was wearing a t-shirt which means that Greg went for his shoulder. I mean what the hell kind of awkward place is that to bite? And plus also, Ranger wears his shirts like someone has painted them on. They exist only to save us all from going into cardiac arrest from seeing his nipples and belly button. So how the hell was it physically possible that he was able to bite Ranger on the shoulder hard enough to rip his shirt, and not come away with at least some kind of skin to incisor contact?

It's not like it's impossible to mark Ranger's skin. I've given him a couple of hickies, so I know. So like… what?

"How… Nevermind, I'm not going to ask."

I went back into the cage with my phone and started taking pictures. I felt like I was doing this a lot lately.

"You know what I'm thinking?" I said. "I should take a course on Crime scene photography and maybe a few forensics classes."

"Why?" Ranger asked.

"So I know what the hell it is I'm doing every time I pull out my phone, so I don't miss things."

"I don't think Crime scene photographers use their cell phones," he said.

"Well, it's handy. I could get a better camera."

"They are heavy."

"Have you lifted my messenger bag? It weighs as much as a Buick; what's a camera and a few dozen lenses."

"How is your back not completely fucked up?"

"Good genes."

"Do you want to take a class or do you want one of the men to teach you?"

"I think a class could be interesting," I said.

"Do you want me to find you one?" he asked.

"Sure," I said.

I finished taking my pictures and walked out of the cage as a guy in a suit arrived. He shook hands with Ranger, looked at the Muppets, and then back at Ranger to see if he was serious. Some silent communication took place, and he waved some guys in coveralls into the cage to start gathering up the suits.

"What's with Speak No Evil?" He asked Ranger. I looked at Greg, who was still covering his mouth.

"He wasn't thrilled with the idea of the Muppets being taken into police custody. He tried to hit her and bite me. I took exception to it."

"Does he have all of his teeth?"

"I haven't removed any," Ranger said.

He flipped open a pad, and pulled a pen out of his pocket, "injuries the result of self-defense." He flipped the book closed and looked at Ranger, "Pressing charges?"

"Yes," Ranger said.

"Locals can handle that," he said. "We'll drag him over for you."

"Thanks," Ranger said. He looked at the evidence bags, "Are they going to Trenton for processing?"

"Yep," the mystery man said. Here's the thing, Ranger almost always introduces me to people. He was very conspicuously not introducing me to this guy, who I'm assuming was a Fed. There had to be a reason why.

"Are you going to handle this?" Ranger asked.

"Fuck no," he said, "I was just handy. I'll pass it on to someone co-operative."

"Thanks," Ranger said. They shook hands and Ranger ushered me out of the cellar.

"So is Agent Jay going to wipe my memory because I've seen his face?"

"His name is Aslan Schimizzi," Ranger said. "He's different."

"How different is different?"

"Let's just say that our paths don't usually cross on US soil."

"What's he doing helping us out?"

"I called my usual handler and told him I needed someone to gather some evidence," he said, "He showed up."

Ranger and I went back to the truck, and we got directions to the pool, which is where we were informed that we could find Sadie Moore. She wasn't in the pool but rather, beside it, with a swim coach.

"You really think that this is going to make a difference?" The coach was asking.

"I do," Sadie said.

"The other suit is quicker," the coach said.

"She's more comfortable in this one," Sadie said. "That matters."

"It was her idea to get the new suit," the coach said.

"I know," Sadie said. She put her stuff down and pulled out a notebook, "Look at this guy here. Batter J has an insane slugging percentage. You can pretty much guarantee that if there is someone on base when he's at-bat, that person is making it home. Pitchers hate it when he gets up to the plate, you see them get visibly shaken when the bases are loaded, and he's on deck. He gets an inordinate number of wild pitches sent his way. Last year, he had one that grazed his chin. A month later, he comes up to the plate wearing one of these chin guard things you see on the helmets. His idea. Says he's in his own head about the pitch that nearly hit him in the face. He cannot hit the broad side of a barn while he's wearing it. Whether it's because he's thinking about why he's wearing it, or if it's because it's uncomfortable, or he's just not used to it, who knows. He took it off a month later, and he has three back to back multi-homerun games. And his average goes up to what it was before he put the thing on."

"Baseball and swimming are different sports."

"Which is why I'm modifying the math, but the principals can be applied because, like baseball, individual performance is what matters. You can have an entire team that's on fire, and have one guy blow it for everyone."

Ranger and I approached, and they looked at us.

"Hi, can we help you?" Sadie asked.

"I'm Stephanie Manoso; I'm a private investigator," I handed Sadie my card. "Can we talk?"

"What about?" She asked.

"A missing person," I said. That she had no idea what I was talking about blew my mind. It would be the first thing that jumped into my head if someone told me they were a private investigator, and someone I knew had gone missing under suspicious circumstances. "Is there somewhere we can talk?"

"Do you mind if I sit in as well?" The coach asked.

"No," Sadie said. The coach called one of her assistants over to record times, and we went into the coach's office to talk.

"Can I just get your name?" I asked the coach.

"Oh yeah, sorry. Laurel Gulahorn." Laurel was about five-four and wearing a tracksuit and sneakers. Her hair was cut short and slicked back. She perched on the edge of her desk and put a hand on Sadie's shoulder in support. She knew why we were here. I'm sure of it. "I'm going to want your card. Just in case."

"Yeah, sure," I said. I handed Laurel a card, and she sized me up. I don't think she liked the look of me because she didn't relax her posture in the slightest.

"You said this was about a missing person?" Sadie asked, "And you think it's connected to me somehow?"

"It's about Waldo Dickerson," I said.

"Oh God has something happened to one of his students? If you think he's involved, you're dead wrong. He's a good man, and…"

"No we're looking for Waldo Dickerson," I said.

"He's not missing," Sadie said, clearly confused, "We're supposed to be having dinner together tonight. He just confirmed via email this morning."

"You're joking," I said.

"No," she said, "We meet once a month to talk about my research. Usually, it's at my mom's house so they can catch up afterward, and so we can use her pool. But Mom's in New York this week, so we decided to make arrangements to meet here."

"How often do you meet away from your mother's house?"

"I dunno," she said, "Three times maybe. I make an effort to go home because mom is lonely but sometimes I can't, so he comes here."

"You're sure he emailed you this morning to confirm?"

"Yes," she said.

"I think you had better sit down," Ranger said.

"What? Why?"

"Sit down, Miss Moore," Ranger said. I got Laurel's office chair and wheeled it around to Sadie. She sat, and Ranger crouched down to her eye level. "We have reason to believe that the man you are meeting with tonight is not Waldo Dickerson. A few weeks ago, he was taken against his will, and the last person to see him said he had sustained injuries that would suggest that it's doubtful that he will be found alive."

"What?" She said. "You're wrong. There must be another Waldo Dickerson."

"Have you actually spoken to him since the last time you saw him?" Ranger asked.

"No," she said. "We email."

Ranger showed her the picture of Dickerson from our file, and she started to cry. "What happened? Who would want to hurt him? He's a science teacher."

"I don't know," I said, "That's what we're trying to find out. The police have hit nothing but dead ends, which is why we're running down leads."

"What do you need from me?"

"Can you tell me how you know him?" I asked.

"He's an old friend of my mom's," she said. "They were engaged in college, but then he had his accident, and he broke it off. Mom was heartbroken and moved to New York as soon as she graduated. That's when she met my dad. When daddy got hurt during 9/11, he had to go to physiotherapy, and it turned out that Uncle Wally was in the same facility for rehab after shoulder replacement surgery. Dad was being a total bastard to mom, and Uncle Wally told him that one of the biggest mistakes he ever made was pushing mom away and told him to get his act together. It worked, and dad was better for a while, and then when he was dying, Wally hung out with me during all of his appointments, and he would come to get me when things were getting really hard, just to take me away from it."

"And he and your mother are just friends now?"

"Yes," she said. "I'd love it if they got together, but mom says they aren't like that anymore, and he loves Bernadette so much."

"The last time you saw him, did he seem upset about anything?"

"He corked the wine, and it pissed him off," she said, "But he seemed normal. He seemed like he always does when we are working."

"Why is he advising you? Shouldn't you be under the supervision of one of your professors?"

"Oh, I do have a professor looking over my shoulder. It's just that Wally is the one who developed some of the math I'm using, and why read about his work when I can get it from the horse's mouth? You're sure he's not just hiding somewhere?"

"There is a very slim chance he's hiding, but the odds are against it," Ranger said. "And I say this, knowing that I'm speaking to a statistician."

"But he emailed me yesterday. He answered a question not just anyone could answer and he… He's a science teacher. He's never hurt anyone and…"

"We're trying to get to the bottom of it," Ranger said. "Knowing what we know, I don't like that someone is arranging to meet you. I'm the owner of a security firm. I'd like to put some men on you to see to your protection."

"You don't think someone is trying to hurt me, do you?"

"I think something about your relationship with Dickerson has them concerned. It could be that he's alive and they want to use you as a way to pressure him because they can't get at Bernadette. I don't know. I don't want to take the risk."

"What about mom?" She asked.

"I have a branch in New York; if you call her and let her know they are coming, I can have men protecting her in less than an hour," Ranger said.

While they were making arrangements, I looked up at the coach for the first time since we started talking to Sadie. She was doing an excellent job of remaining stoic, but she looked shaken. I caught her eye, and she nodded at the door. We slipped out of the office and into the empty corridor.

"Did you know Dickerson?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "We were students here at the same time."

"Wow," I said, "It's one big happy family here."

"When we started school here, it was really small. There was no anonymity, all of the professors knew all of the students, and we all looked out for one another. There are quite a few of us from that era who ended up on the staff in one capacity or another."

"Why didn't Dickerson?"

"Because he said that he would never step foot on this campus again after he graduated," she said.

"Why?"

"Because his accident wasn't an accident," she said. "You're looking for people who want to hurt him?"

"Yes," I said.

"Ed Settle, John Lewis, Gary Gadsden, and Jerry Caruso," she said. "You're going to want to look into them."

"Why?" I asked.

"Waldo's research wasn't for any assignment. I guess he got really into baseball stats thanks to the influence of a surrogate father figure he had growing up. Anyway, this guy liked to talk player stats, but his application of them was kind of, well it was more guess work than anything. Waldo got really into doing the deeper analysis stuff, and that's when he got into sabermetrics. When he got to University, he used to watch everything about himself that he could get his hands on. He'd watch footage of himself when he played, and he was always tweaking things based on what he saw, in himself and other players."

"That's good right?"

"Yeah, but the other guys on the team razzed him about it because he was always arguing with the coaches when they'd tell him to drop an elbow or adjust his stance, or whatever. One night, we were hanging out at someone's house, and we were watching Eight Men Out. There had been a lot of drinking going on, and they got into a heated discussion about the Black Socks Scandal. Waldo said that if he could get his hands on their statistics from that season, he could prove once and for all if they were playing to their full potential. They bet him that he couldn't. The pot got up to $200, and Waldo spent two weeks going over data and then testing his math against dozens of teams. They took it to one of his professors, and he said that the Math was sound. Waldo exonerated the Black Socks posthumously. I think someone else did it years later too, but Wally did it first. Anyway, when he did that, a couple of his teammates got interested in what Wally was doing with his math. He explained how it worked, and he decided hell, maybe he could help the entire team. He did, and he ran the statistics, and realized, that something was fishy. Our guys were dominating that season, and we weren't losing games, but he knew something wasn't right. At first, he thought some guys were just phoning it in, saving their energy for the playoffs, but he came across proof that they were cheating."

"Do you know what?"

"No," she said, "He agonized about it for days. Poor Abby didn't know what to do with him and said that he was an absolute wreck. In the end, he told the coach?"

"What happened?"

"Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. Then a week later, Wally's car was pushed into oncoming traffic, and he ended up in the hospital. He nearly lost his place in the school because he'd missed so much time. They said he failed all of his classes. It wasn't until his lawyers threatened to sue the school that they let him back in, and they reinstated part of his scholarship."

"I was told that a car drifted into his lane," I said.

"No," she said. "Some asshole drove up the shoulder and pushed his car into oncoming traffic. The only witness to the accident was the driver of the car he collided with, but the man was in absolutely no condition to testify to that. He suffered from severe head trauma. Wally was lucky."

"He told you about the other car?"

"He told his girlfriend," she said. "And he told Calvin Darren."

"Who's that?"

"Calvin was the assistant pitching coach at the time," she said. "He and Wally were close, and he was one of the few members of the team that visited him in the hospital. Calvin hit the roof when he found out that they were going to kick Wally out of school. He's part of the reason why they backed down. He wrote a signed letter to Wally's lawyer telling him that he'd just sat through a meeting where they discussed expelling him before he had a chance to blow the whistle on the cheating scandal."

"Do you know where I can find Mr. Darren?"

"He's head of athletics. He has an office on the other side of this building."

Ranger came out of the office, looking grim.

"We can't reach Mrs. Moore," Ranger said. "Green is on his way here to pick up Sadie. I want to stay here until I've got a team ready."

"I should go in and sit with her," Laurel said. She went back into her office, and I looked up at Ranger.

"Were you expecting any of this?" I asked.

"Nope," he said. "But we need to get Sadie to safety."

"You don't want to use her as bait, try and draw out whoever this is?"

"Given the heat they were packing at the warehouse, no. I don't think the risk is worth it. What I am regretting is that there are not more women in my employ."

"Why?" I asked. "Besides the fact that you should have way more women working for you."

"Because my men stand out," Ranger said. "Even dressed casually, they are threatening. I need someone less conspicuous to sit around and watch the bar for anyone suspicious. I'd use you, but they know you and Connie. I could ask Molly, but I don't think she'll go for it."

"I have more questions to ask around campus," I said. Ranger bent down and drew his backup weapon from his ankle -holster, and handed it to me. I put it in my bag, regretting that I'd chosen to wear a dress today.

"Be careful," he said. "I'll be watching."

I nodded, and he looked pointedly at my watch. He'd given it to me in Florida, and in addition to being a GPS tracker, it had an emergency beacon that would broadcast to all of Rangeman if I was in trouble and another little feature that would transmit to Ranger only. He pulled an earpiece out of his pocket and put it in his ear, and then I pressed the button that got him only.

"Do you think Abby is in trouble?"

"I don't know. But I will rest easier when one of my men has eyes on her. I want to take them both into protective custody."

"See if she'll go for it," I said. Ranger gave me a subtle thumbs up to let me know the sound check was working. I walked away and thought about the first time we'd done a sound check before a job, and sighed. "The watch takes all of the fun out of being wired."

I'd like to think I made Ranger smile, but I was too far away to be sure.

Calvin Darren wasn't in his office when I went looking for him. One of the batting coaches saw me knocking on the door to his office, and led me to the dugout, where Darren was laughing with some of the other coaches. If I had to guess, he wasn't that much older than Dickerson was.

Darren was about six-four and had arms that appeared slightly longer than was proportionate to the rest of his body. He had the same sort of stalky build that my father had, suggesting that he was relatively fit, but had enough of a gut on him to let you know that the only six-pack he was worried about was the one in his fridge and not the one that used to be under his shirt.

"If you're here looking for one of the boys, you're out of luck. They know better than to even look at a woman during practice. They'll all be at Spud's bar later," Darren said when he saw me.

"I'm going to pretend that means you think I look young enough to be an undergraduate," I said.

"Well you can start university at any age, can't you?" He said, with a genial smile. "Calvin Darren, what can I do for you?"

"I'm Stephanie Manoso," I said. "I'm the private investigator who's been hired to look into a missing person case, and I was told you might have a lead for me."

"You're a private investigator?" He said incredulously.

"Yep," I said. I guess that phrase carried more weight when I had Ranger behind me, looking scary. "I work for a private security firm in Trenton, and one of our clients' husbands has gone missing under suspicious circumstances. The police have run out of leads, so she's asked us to do what we can."

"Can I see a card or identification of some kind?" He asked.

I handed him my card, and he looked at it.

"Well no shit," he said. "I've actually heard of these guys."

"The boss will be happy to hear it," I said.

Something caught his eye, and he looked out onto the field, "Dammit," he said and turned to the guy he'd been chatting too. "I think Vern's shoulder is acting up again; want to go remind him why we have trainers on staff, and that if he doesn't handle it, it's only going to get worse?"

The guy jogged out of the dugout, and Darren looked at me. "Who's missing?"

"Waldo Dickerson," I said. The effect was immediate, and he sat down hard, looking pale. I got him a cup of some exceptionally pink sports drink from a big cooler, and brought it to him.

"You're joking," he said.

"I'm not," I said. "We've reason to believe there's been foul play, and we're trying to figure out who might have a motive to hurt him. One of the people I've spoken to says that his car accident wasn't an accident and that there was some kind of incident in the weeks before it that may have motivated it?"

"Yes," he said. "But it was decades ago."

"We were told that you two were close? I thought maybe he might have told you something he hasn't told anyone else."

"Until I got married, I was a talent scout for the Angels, but then my wife came along, and she got pregnant, and I didn't want to be on the road all of the time, so I accepted an assistant pitching coach job here. Waldo and I used to talk statistics all of the time."

"I understood that Dickerson was an outfielder? How did you get close?"

"You know how you just gel with some people? We were like that. You could tell that he had that quality that makes a star ballplayer. He was the backbone of the team. If a player were in a slump, he'd spend hours going over stats, and tape, to see if he could pinpoint the problem, and help them. He lived and breathed this game, and so did I."

"What happened to change that? I mean what would motivate him to switch to teaching math and science when I'm sure with his skills, he could have done what you did, and found a job in the profession?"

"At first, he was going to. Actually, he was talking helping out with the coaching staff for the remainder of the season, and talking to his physiotherapist about rehab, and possibly learning a new way to throw or hit the ball, since his range of motion was going to be greatly diminished. He's tall, so there was even talk about switching to first base, or shortstop, so he wouldn't have to throw the ball as far."

"But none of that happened."

"No," he said. "And when everything started to go sideways for him, it beat him down enough that I think, in the end, it just broke his heart."

"Can you tell me what happened when he brought the cheating to your attention?"

"The test he developed, to help determine if the White Socks threw the game, he applied it to our team and discovered that four of our star players were not playing up to their potential. We were on a championship run, and we were hot, so obviously they weren't throwing games. He thought maybe they were slacking off against weaker teams. I mean you're not going to play your hardest against guys that you can beat blindfolded. He figured that must be it, but then I guess he heard something at a party how someone was pissed off that we'd not covered the spread in our most recent victory. He did some digging and realized that we didn't cover the spread a lot of the time. A lot more than was typical. Instead of coming to me with it, he confronted the players involved."

"What happened?"

"They offered him a cut to keep his mouth shut. They told him that he didn't have to sacrifice his own stats, or stop playing to his full potential, he just had to shut his trap. He didn't. He went to the head coach and showed him what he found. The coach told him he didn't have proof, just suspicion. He wasn't going to rock the boat that late in the season and he said we had to focus on winning and if what they were doing was keeping them sharp, as long as we weren't losing, he didn't give a rat's ass. Waldo couldn't live with that. On the day of his accident, he was on his way back from visiting my predecessor as head of athletics. They had us bench the players involved, and we played until we were eliminated, and then they were investigated and expelled. It was done quietly."

"What about what happened to Dickerson?" I said, "He was going to be expelled too?"

"At first, that wasn't the case. They were going to honor Wally's scholarship, and he was going to be fine, but he insisted that what happened to him wasn't an accident; that it was done to shut him up. He wanted to go to the league and tell them what was going on. That's when my predecessor told him that they were taking his scholarship from him. He was more or less accused of being part of the gambling ring, and that he was being removed from the team and was no longer allowed at the school. That's when I wrote the letter to his lawyer, and they backed down. He graduated, and he left here swearing he wanted nothing to do with the school or the sport again."

"But now he's working with a student in the school," she said.

"Yep," he said. "Could have knocked me over with a feather when he turned up on campus to watch the games with Sadie. We had a beer afterward, and he said he was only here for her. I asked if he thought she was his; considering who her mother is, I thought it was a possibility."

"And?"

"He said that was just another part of his life that got fucked up by this school. He said it was for the best though. He was married to this woman he's crazy about."

"Do you think these guys might be the ones behind his disappearance?"

"It's possible. It won't be either of my predecessors, because they are dead," he said. "The guys he got expelled? Maybe. Who knows if they amounted to much after school?"

"How does Greg Neudendorf fit into this picture?"

"He was our mascot back then," He said, "So he'd know all of the players involved, and I'm pretty sure he was close to Ed Settle."

"But he wasn't part of the gambling ring?"

"Not so far as I know," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "When was the last time you saw Dickerson?"

"About a month ago," he said. "He was here with Sadie, and they were laughing about something."

"Baseball related?"

"Wedding," he said. "She asked him to walk her down the aisle. She told me that he'd been a father to her since her dad died."

"Waldo's wife had absolutely no idea she existed. Any idea why?"

"No, I can't imagine why he'd keep her a secret. Even if Sadie were his, Bernadette came along well after Sadie was born, so it's not like she's the result of an affair."

"What do you think of Sadie's research?" I asked.

"It'll be interesting to see if she can do what she says she can do. As far as I know, sabermetrics can only be applied to baseball, and there have to be other statistical measurements in place for other sports, so why is she reinventing the wheel?" He stopped to watch a pitcher throw a couple of warm-up throws, and he excused himself and jogged out to the mound. I couldn't think of anything else to ask him, so I left him to his coaching.

I was about to leave the dugout, when I saw a binder sticking out from under a bag on the bench. Nobody was looking, and there were no visible cameras around, so I shoved the bag and flipped the binder open. It wasn't a playbook if anything, the pages I'd flipped to looked like a bookie's ledger. I shoved the whole binder into my messenger bag and left.


End file.
